Sapien
by Myurra-K
Summary: Rick knows he already owes Daryl too much, he doesn't want to keep asking, but this isn't just about what he wants anymore. It's about what they need. Daryl isn't helping at all, because whatever he's doing to try and stop what's happening between them, he's doing it wrong. Question is, does he really want to stop it? Rick/Daryl
1. Sapien I : Evolution

**Sapien**

_Part I : __Evolution_

.:.

Maybe this chapter of his life's story could've started a different way. It could've been more poetic or at least a little less shameful. He might've been able to say that it didn't all just begin with an unexpected want, and that he knew from the very start that this was exactly what he'd been looking for his whole life, not just on a physical level but an emotional one, too. He'd had everything he needed right in front of him but he'd been too blinded to see it. To be fair, he wasn't the only one perfecting the the meaning of naivety.

If he wanted to think too hard on it, because that was always his way – _overthink, or don't think at all; everythin' or nothin' and all that jazz_ – he could've drawn the lines back at Daryl's quick actions saving him from his demons. Lori was dead, he had killed every walker in the immediate vicinity, and there was this rippling fear amongst the others that he was finally lost to them all. He'd wondered if they were better off without him. He'd wondered if they thought they were better off without him, too.

He didn't have the courage to stay away, and that was when he saw_ them_. Carol and Carl, playing with a bundle wrapped in a fleecy blanket, and he remembered that he had people out there waiting for him.

After finding out what Daryl had done for his baby girl, he'd cornered the other man to thank him. Daryl had at first brushed it off saying it was what they do, but Rick, in a moment of doubt, had asked why. He was answered with a hasty "you're family," and Rick was left watching the redneck-turned-antihero back away out the door with eyes shied to the ground, too nervous to wait for a response. It was the sign of a man used to rejection, and while the brother in Rick couldn't fathom why, the cop in him knew all too well.

In the weeks before that, when Lori was still alive and Daryl's worth was glaringly more than even Rick himself had realised until forcefully taking the prison, he'd found himself desperately grasping roots on a steep metaphorical cliff-face. For those few weeks of peace, he had been trying to tell Daryl just how much they needed him without saying the words that swelled his tongue to the roof of his mouth, trying to avoid crossing some invisible boundary the other man had plotted between himself and the group. Yet here it had been said in the simplest, most truthful way possible. _Daryl_, the man with the fewest words of them all.

_Family. _

Proud they both were, so much so that the syllables stuck to their teeth, never a goodbye as they stared at one another through the trees before a hunt or a scavenge, each one feeling as though they should be saying or doing something but they had no idea what.

If he really wanted to get to the roots of it, he could've blamed it on Lori's death. Really, he could've blamed it on Lori altogether, because in the months he could barely look at her or her swelling belly, Daryl was there with his intense stare and his loyalty and his nods of acknowledgement. One small tip of the other man's chin meant an entire world more than Lori's fingers snaking in vain over his wrist for comfort.

In the end, it all came down to chemistry.

Some people just click. Between Rick and Daryl, it wasn't an instant connection, not even in the slightest, but it might as well have been.

For Rick, scrap pipe in hand and ready to kill, seeing a hard-cut man with a crossbow falling out of the tree line and into their sight was all at once relieving and dreadful. The introduction of Daryl Dixon into his life, seeing a living being as opposed to the dead ripped from the arms of their reapers, was timed near perfectly enough for Rick to steam forward and greet the stranger himself, but the moment he heard that drawl, that Southern twang that sent odd sensations crawling almost unpleasantly up his spine, there was distrust. Recalling the racist, vile redneck they'd abandoned in Atlanta, it registered that this was the man they were praying the delayed return of.

_Dixon._

Hair ambiguously dark blonde in the sunlight, an assortment of squirrel carcasses slung over his shoulder, Daryl Dixon's eyes narrowed sharply at the newcomer, flickering between familiar and unfamiliar faces, with anything more than one glance enough to reveal his curiosity. From what he could see, this stranger wasn't aloof as such, but he was definitely impassive toward human companionship, or else he'd have had some friends aside from his cracker brother. From someone who was so reserved, being an item of piqued interest felt like something he should be either proud or wary of. Besides, Daryl may have glanced several times more than necessary to assess for a threat, but Rick knew he'd been the one that stared blatantly the whole time.

He wasn't going to be completely cliché and say there was '_just something about him_'. He knew what it was about Daryl that interested him, apart from the family tree of course. Daryl was one of the rare few people who made Rick overthink, during not just the first but even up to the umpteenth impression, and a lot of that had to do with the fact their obvious intrigue was mirrored in one another. To Daryl, Rick might've been a stranger, but Rick already felt he knew everything about this man and he was ashamed to admit he saw nothing more than a tamer version of his brother. There was only ever one alpha male, after all, and if the Dixon brothers stuck together he could see right away which one was which.

There were things about Daryl that made you look, whether or not you realised it, and Rick was prone to succumbing to the temptation even a year on and knowing that, if he closed his eyes, he could recall that face as intricately as he could his wife's.

Daryl's face was, for lack of a better complimentary masculine word, odd. Really, it wasn't a bad, or even an average appearance, because there was no doubt in Rick's mind that the redneck scrubbed up pretty nice, but there were little things that threw him for a loop and he just couldn't figure out why. Not at first at least.

In the first day Rick met Daryl, he'd seen the otherwise pensively hostile man express grief, and rage. It took him a while to understand that Daryl would, for the most part, uphold a pinched nonchalant expression, and that he wouldn't be swinging like an emotional pendulum every damn day. It was just_ that_ day, the one they met, that happened to be an outlying factor in the equation of the younger Dixon brother.

It also took a while for Rick to realise what was so strange about the other man's face, but he soon put it down to something as simple as asymmetry. Biologically, many terms of attractiveness come from how well one side of the face matched the other, which was why lazy eyes or crooked teeth or bent noses all seemed to work against people. That was why it was so hard to figure out, while it was still from an objective perspective, whether or not Daryl was an attractive man or not – he had all the features of a damn model, really, but something just didn't seem to sit right. He looked more intimidating than his brother though his shoulders weren't as broad or his height as imposing. Unlike his brother, Daryl actually looked dangerous, but after getting to know him the look in his eyes translated closer to _mean_ than to homicidal, which at the very least was a more accurate idea.

Daryl had small eyes. Perhaps they only looked smaller because they seemed to be in a perpetual angry squint, thin eyebrows bent sharply in a natural frown, but something about those eyes seemed almost hidden, tight. It took three weeks for Rick to realise the other man's irises were the same blue as his own, because it took that long to get a good look at them. Most men like Daryl weren't fond of meeting people's gaze, but despite being no exception to this he never had that problem with Rick. At first it was to challenge him, but eventually that look became beseeching. It was a short while before Rick realised that it must've been the same way he looked at Merle, needing to be lead despite knowing full well he was strong enough to be his own man.

No matter how much sleep Daryl did or didn't get, there was always a looseness below those sharp, snakelike eyes, but by the time Rick met him it could've been put down to age or simply malnourishment. By the time they crossed paths, everyone had skin hanging off their bones; even the children.

Just like his eyes, everything else about Daryl seemed to be small-of-feature. His mouth was a straight cut line, unlike Rick whose mouth turned up or Shane's whose bowed down, thin lips pale of colour that formed a scowl or less commonly a smirk. Daryl wasn't used to smiling, or laughing neither. Whenever he reluctantly cracked a small grin, he seemed almost unsure of how to do it, like he was self-conscious of his teeth though they were perfectly straight, surprisingly so for a redneck – but perhaps that's stereotyping again. Generally, when he was amused by something, he'd scoff and look away, eyes pinching to thin slits in a smile that rarely pulled at his sharp mouth.

He had a beauty-spot, which felt awkward and strange to be referring to as belonging to a man – let alone _Daryl Dixon_ – but it was there, beneath the scruff of hair on his face above one corner of his mouth, right in the dimple of his non-existent smile. It was such an unexpected feature, really, that at first when Rick had glimpsed it he'd thought it was just a smudge from running around in the woods for days by himself. It was something incredibly unique and only added to the unusual handsomeness.

The odd features took Rick straight back to those bewitchingly strange eyes. They were uneven, but not in size or colour; something more subtle. One eye looked more tired, less defined. After some uncomfortable amount of time covertly staring at his fellow survivor, Rick finally understood what was so uneven, but only after glimpsing the faintest of surgical scars. They bracketed one of Daryl's eyes along the bridge of his nose and at the edge of his temporal lobe. He didn't get the courage to ask what had happened to Daryl's eye for a long time, but it was a cold winter night made for sharing when it slipped out.

Rick couldn't sleep; Lori had been trying to insist he felt the baby kick, and he'd given in against his better judgement. After impatiently waiting for her to fall asleep, he'd crawled off the thin yoga mat they'd substituted for a mattress and sought out the man on watch. Daryl didn't look at him until he realised Rick had only come to keep him company, not to tell him something pertaining to security, and for the first time, Rick allowed himself to believe there was real concern there in this silent man's glance.

The light from the lone, tired candle caught just faintly on the silver line along the bridge of Daryl's nose, and the question tumbled out without pre-thought.

"What happened to your eye?"

Daryl flinches, instantly lifting a hand to the left side of his face, tracing it gently, and doesn't reply. Rick leaves the question hanging between them, and instead pulls a foot up onto the thick-set sill they're both perched on, resting a hand atop his knee.

"Felt the baby move," he says quietly. The way Daryl seems to perk up the words is a little concerning, considering nothing else seemed to get him out of his shell so quickly. Talking about the children brought out a weird side in the other man, a protective side, and Rick wasn't quite sure where it stemmed from, because he was at least ninety-percent certain Daryl didn't have any kids of his own.

That alone was a strange concept, that the hunter was only a few scant years younger than himself, yet he had no partner and no children. Rick was married at twenty-two, to his first and only serious girlfriend. Maybe Daryl had the right idea all along.

"Got a strong drop-kick manoeuvre going, that's for sure."

"Li'l asskicker," Daryl says with a breathy brand of amusement. "Bet it's a girl."

Rick smiles but it's with caution. "You a baby-whisperer or somethin' else I don't know about?" Daryl shrugs. "What makes you so sure?"

"It can only go one of two ways," he remarks, like Rick missed the point completely. "I 'unno, guess I believe in tha balance an' all that shit," he says, waving his hand absently. "Adam and Eve, ya know? There's a li'l boy, but no li'l girl."

Rick speaks before he thinks. "And if Sophia was still alive?"

Daryl's expression darkens, his mouth tightening, and he turns to glare harshly out the window. "Then it'd be anyone's guess what the brat's gonna be."

Rick reminds himself to never speak of Sophia to Daryl ever again. The silence between them lingers until it no longer feels tense, and Rick mutters aloud to himself. "Adam and Eve...you religious, Daryl?"

Daryl scoffs, but it sounds more like a violent snort, like he truly could barely keep himself from laughing. "If 'e's real, what right does he 'ave to demand respect from me, after all tha shit he's put me through?"

Rick's about to ask, but this time Daryl's looking at him, and he stays quiet.

"Born into it, grew up with it, but never believed a goddamned word of it. Merle tried once, when I was a kid, ta really hammer the fear ah god home, but I just wasn't havin' none of it. He stopped wearin' 'is cross when he was twen'y somethin'. Guess he gave up believin', too."

That brought him to another question. "Speaking of – how come you and Merle don't look like each other?"

Daryl frowns for a moment, then sniffs, staring out the window again. "Sometimes I forget you met Merle before ya met me," he says in contemplation, then, "ya parents are the ones that raise ya, not the ones that fuck to make ya."

It takes a moment for it to sink in what Daryl had just said. "You and Merle aren't brothers?"

"We aint got the same dad. Ma 'n pa split up a few times 'fore I was born, and accordin' ta Merle, my pa took one look at me in tha hospital and said I wasn' 'is. Never bothered me brother, though. Even when I grew up lookin' nothin' like 'im, and 'e looks a spittin' image of our old man, 'e still didn' care. Ma died 'fore I found out who mah real dad is. Not that I care or nothin'."

He races a hand through his hair, now long enough to be brushed from his face, and he realises not for the first time how much darker it is now than when they'd first met. He reads Rick's mind, which is just as amazing as it is creepy, though he probably just glanced the way Rick was staring at the dark wisps curling about his ears.

"Used ta live on a property, jus' Merle an' me. Me brother was fucken' useless, so I had ta do most'a the work. I was outside alot and it just got lighter by itself, guess the sun used ta bleach it. Hair was blonde for so long I didn't even know it was supposed ta be brown. 'lways preferred it longer, too, but Merle'd just get me drunk an' shave it while I was passed out."

He laughs, like these are fond memories, and perhaps Rick doesn't understand it because his happy memories are actually noteworthy happy. For someone as easy to please as Daryl, maybe it isn't so surprising that he'd look back and laugh at these things. Maybe this is grief; mourning the old world and how simple things used to be, lamenting the loss of his 'dearest' brother.

It occurs to him at that moment that this is the most Daryl has ever spoken about himself in one go, and it's to Rick of all people. He's told a few of the group about his adventure getting lost in the forest when he was ten, and how it bore into him a great love of nature and the things that kept you alive when you didn't have electricity or a warm bed. Never before has he spoken so openly about his family, though; not even about Merle. There were two sure things Daryl refused to talk about - one of those things was his childhood, and Rick along with everybody else had their hunches as to why. The other thing was Merle; the few times the other man's name was brought up in reckless conversation, Daryl would get this look like he still blamed them.

He still doesn't find out what happened to Daryl's eye, and he doesn't deign to hope he ever will, but something changed that night. There was a revelation they'd both been previously avoiding, and it was all about the chemistry.

Ever since that first day, they'd been scarily in sync. From Rick reading Daryl's attacks better than he'd ever managed to read someone's before, to Daryl's surprising co-operation, to the way the two of them took out their first walker together with a simple gesture telling one another where to be.

They hadn't even known one another existed five hours before re-entering the department store, and Rick had spotted the walker wandering about by herself. He didn't even stop to think that Daryl might purposely ignore him, or even that he wouldn't understand what Rick was asking of him with the silence, but as soon as he'd directed Daryl where to go, the volatile man was all stealth, slinking past with his crossbow poised, taking it down with one shot.

It was a mutual understanding that they were good together, that for some reason their chances of survival were dramatically increased so long as they stuck together. Maybe this was why Daryl never stabbed him in his sleep those first two months. The more unstable Shane became, the more Rick prayed for Daryl's proximity. He'd never not had a wingman of sorts, always attached at the hip to Shane with plenty of breathing space and leaning support. It was only natural that Rick would defer to Daryl eventually, even while Shane was still alive, much to the frustration of his former partner, and much to the hunter's not-so-secret pleasure.

Daryl wasn't used to being treated like an equal, or genuinely relied on, or probably even wanted in the first place.

That he was looking for Rick's friendship at all had been a surprise, and a part of Rick felt guilty for overlooking the other man's value for so long. He felt more comfortable with this brash redneck than he had with Shane for years.

In their past life, because that was exactly what it was now, Daryl may have been the kind of man Rick would find himself in the position of apprehending, or searching for in the woods, or following through a supermarket because he looked suspicious. He liked to think this survivalist chemistry would've been present back then, and that Daryl might've co-operated with him or helped find a suspect or called with an anonymous tip once the station was out of sight, but chances were he'd have been called a 'Pig' and spat at.

The Dixon brothers were just those kind of men. Most rednecks he'd ever met were.

Either way, this new world, their 'reality', was what he needed to focus on, and in this reality there were no plotted lines of the law, no margins within which the likes of all 'Dixon' types resided, and there was no time to write clean cursives of all the petty little paths their insignificant lives could've gone on. Bills and taxes and fees and insurances - work to pay to live and so on – that was the way of life once, but not anymore. Now, it was food and water and ammunition – run and hide and maybe survive.

In this world, there were no cops and criminals, there were no rednecks and city-folk, there was no religion or race or the boundaries their species had set in stone over the centuries, and moral high-ground would sooner see you dead than groomed with praise. There were no rules.

There was nothing left of his old life. Even his own son was a stranger. Even _Lori_ was gone.

There was only Rick and his people. His son, Carl, was grown beyond his years. The doctor, Hershel, who made sure they wouldn't be taken out by something as humiliating as a road rash. Glen and Maggie, the scavenger lovebirds, deft at getting in and out unnoticed with a good fuck in the middle just for spite. The nurturer, Beth, who made sure to take care of whomever she could, with her eyes dauntingly opened to this life they lived in. Carol, the widower, who cooked and cleaned and did all the things that a mother would do, filling in the hole that had been left by Sophia by taking care of them. His daughter, Judith – or 'Li'l Asskicker, as Daryl called her, because he'd been right the whole time, and he wasn't kidding when he named her – who was their bright star of hope, the infant who felt more like she was the daughter of everyone in their mix-matched family than she did his own kin. He didn't like to think why exactly that was.

Then there was his right hand, Daryl himself, the man who filled in all the spaces Rick wasn't large enough to cover, and who held the group together when Rick wasn't able, and who saved their lives over and over and never asked for thanks.

Rick can only count three times he'd saved Daryl's life in the past year, but he's lost track of just how many times Daryl's pulled his ass out of the firing line, slapped him on the back after checking him over, and continued right on like he hadn't just done something so monumental people used to get medals for it in the old world.

He'd be dead without Daryl. They_ all_ would.

That still doesn't help Rick overcome his selfishness, because there's still one more thing he wants to ask of Daryl, and really he has no right asking for anything from him, the man who smiled so rarely that he only did it for the people in this new 'family'.

Sometimes he wishes things had happened a little differently, so it might've saved them both the frustration.

.:.

* * *

**[End Of Chapter : Author's Note Beneath]**

**A/N:** Hello all you lovely people reading this story. Seeing as this is my first entry into this fandom, I'm just gonna have a little chat down here where you can ignore me all you like. Some of it's relative to the story, though, so I suppose I'll start with that.

This is my first TWD fic, as well as my first Rickyl fic, and I'm not at all denying myself the chance to take liberties with the timeline. In this story, Andrea and Michonne and the entire Governor debacle hasn't happened yet, and doesn't happen until after this fic finishes, at which point you can decide for yourself if it plays out the same way. As a result, Oscar and Axel survive, and become valuable members of the group.  
My second point is that this story is probably so out of character at points it'll hurt your brain. I don't mean in the sense that Rick or Daryl will break down crying or that Daryl's real forthcoming about his abusive childhood, but lets face it - it's a slash fic, it's gonna be out of character.  
Don't be reading this story expecting porn, or at least not very good porn. This is a plotless romance fic.  
I'm not American, so my spelling's a little different. Sue me.**  
**

This is what I'm going to refer to as my 'test-fic'. I came up with it at the same time as a much longer story I've titled _Darlin'_. This one was much simpler and I didn't actually have to plot it out, but I wanted to write it anyway, because we poor unfortunate souls destined to love Rick and Daryl don't have enough fics to keep us satisfied.

That brings me to my next point - I've seen not just on this website but also on tumblr that there is a lot of abuse between the shipping fandoms. Generally the fandoms with the minority are also the kindest group, and that can be said about most of the Rickylers. The Caryl fans are all so frustrated that they've grown fangs and I just can't handle that, so I'll be disappointed if I get any flames on my Rickyl creations, partly because I support Caryl in a nonchalant 'it's probably gonna happen' way.  
My point is, Rick/Daryl's never gonna happen. I'm not delusional. In fact, I'm not entirely certain Daryl/_anyone_ will happen, because he's just the kind of character that doesn't need a romantic plotline to be unanimously adored. Unfortunately for me, I kind of wear my slash goggles 24/7, and Norman and Andrew's on/off screen bromance isn't helping any.  
So really, what I'm trying to say to anyone who wants to argue with me about supporting Rickyl, is to just let me and other Rickylers have our fun.

Okay, I've said my piece. Carry on!

**MK.**


	2. Sapien II : Metazoa

**Sapien**

_Part II : Metazoa_

.:.

Daryl kinda hates using his gun, but he was no stranger to it, and with hands moving the way they were right now it was truly no surprise he was nearly as good a shot with a bullet as he was with a knife or an arrow. Daryl was a lethal man in the old world, the kind of man who scared people, but in this new world he was a hero. He was someone to be admired.

Carl seemed to agree.

Rick's son sat directly across from Daryl at the cold prison cafeteria table, spoon poised in his half-bowl of creamed corn, eyes intent on the blur of the hunter's hands that stripped and cleaned a gun. Daryl didn't half-ass it, either. He spit-shone every bullet, pipe-cleaned the chamber, and checked all over for scratches and scrapes. There were three more guns to his left, already cleaned and waiting for their designated owners to claim them, and another one to his right, still in line for the polish. He's probably been going at it near an hour.

He looks up, those small blue eyes narrowed fiercely at the footsteps on the concrete, but the look softens to fondness when he sets his sights on Rick, and he offers a small half-smile.

"Mornin'," Daryl greets him, though it sounds like a taunt. Honestly, Rick can't tell if it is or not – Daryl often had some secret amusement about something, and being the big over-sharer he isn't, it was anyone's guess what made him grin in secret.

"Yeah, guess so," Rick hears himself reply, because it could be dusk already for all he knew. He'd had the night shift, relieved by Maggie some time in the earliest hours of the new day, and though couldn't even remember making his way back to his cell he must've because he'd just woken up in his bed about ten minutes ago. Daryl actually lays the gun, half pulled apart, on the cloth so that the loose pieces wouldn't roll. He leans back out of his hunch, arms folding across his chest.

"Ya look..."

"Like shit," Carl finishes for him, quickly shoving in a mouthful of his creamed corn, grinning through it. Small bits of yellow mush are creeping at the edges of his teeth and Rick finds himself cringing at the sight. "Mornin' Dad," Carl says, mimicking Daryl's Southern slur just faintly in the way that told Rick it wasn't really on purpose. They all tended to parrot Daryl when they spent enough time around him. Personally, Rick found himself saying 'y'all' and 'neither' a lot more than he ever used to. Some habits you just can't help but pick up.

"Carl," Rick starts, praying he doesn't sound as exhausted as he still feels, "shoving food in your mouth doesn't cover up the language. I didn't raise you to swear."

"Daryl swears," Carl states petulantly, forcing a pout. Rick, realising he wasn't wrong about the hero worship, turns to give Daryl a foul look he doesn't at all mean. He knows it's transparent because the bastard bloody smirks and tips his chin in challenge.

"Dun' lookit me like that. Yer damn brat's been swearin' longer than I've knowin 'im."

"He looks up to you," Rick says without considering the hypocrisy in the words that flow out, "you should know better."

Rick knows he's not one to talk. The wife that he couldn't stand dies a gruesome death so that her baby may live, and instead of being there for his son and making sure his daughter survived, he went out on a destructive spree of guilt and heartbreak. Daryl stepped up when and where Rick was supposed to. If anyone should chastise someone for not doing their part, it should've been the other way around.

He's about to say as much, but Daryl just shrugs, unfolding his arms finally and pointing a dirty finger rudely across the table at Carl's face, waving it until he got the boy's attention.

"Now listen 'ere, kid," Daryl starts, and immediately Carl straightens, not out of reprimand but out of intent to pay attention, eyes eager. It's amazing. "You know why my mouth's dirtier than an inmate's dick?" he says, and really, Rick's not sure if he cringes because of the vivid imagery that reference gives him or because it was just so inappropriate for his son's ears that he should be mad. "Because I hate my father. Everythin' 'e ever taught me, I purposely forgot, 'cause not one of them things was useful 'cept how to take a punch like a man."

"Can you show me how to do that, then?" Carl asks, missing the very same point that makes Rick feel all kinds of queasy. Daryl just shakes his head.

"Maybe when you're older an' I've had a bit too much scotch," he chuckles, the same way he did when talking about Merle getting him drunk just to shave his head because he refused, like it was somehow twisted into a fond memory in that meddled brain of his. "But when I's was a kid, whenever she heard me copyin' mah old man, me ma would shove a bar 'a soap in mah mouth. Soon learned to shut my trap 'round adults."

"But you swear_ now_," Carl feels the need to point out, and Daryl shrugs.

"'Cause I've lived long enough ta earn that right," he argues back. "Tell ya what, son. If I hear ya swearin' 'round your daddy again, I'ma stuff _your_ mouth so full'a soap you'll be shittin' bubbles the rest of yer life."

Rick smirks despite the urge to slap a palm over his face, because that was just so typical of Daryl. He knew by now that other man didn't have any kids of his own, but he seemed to have a way with them, and this little talk was a perfect example of why. He didn't act like he was above children, or talk to them condescendingly like so many adults who've seen too much of the world did. He met them on the same level, and they seemed to love him for it, foul language notwithstanding.

Carl grinned, shoving another spoonful of cream corn in his mouth, and pulled himself from the bench, racing off with the bowl in his hands and the spoon in his mouth. He nearly runs into Carol as he disappears back into the cell block, but she just shakes her head at him and continues on sweeping by the bars.

Though he'd usually take the seat next to Daryl, he watches the hunter pick his gun back up again and knew he'd only be in the way, so instead he takes the space vacated by his son without comment. The serious look is back on the hunter's features as he carefully examines the revolver after reconstructing it.

"I know what you's was thinkin'," Daryl says suddenly after a few minutes of inspecting the chips on the handle and Rick watching the process. He picks up the polishing rag again and starts running it over the imperfections from repeated use, as though he could simply wipe them away. "Don't."

"What?"

"You're a good father," Daryl says pointedly, glancing up only briefly. "If my old man was like you, maybe I'd 'ave turned out to be a better man like the rest of y'all."

"You _are_ a good man, Daryl," he insists, "nothing like your brother, or like your father."

Daryl looks lost for a moment, before the switch happens. His right eye twitches narrower, a sneer starts to pull his mouth, and he tosses the rag back on the table like a whip. "Shit, man, what would you know?" he growls, "you don' know me. Ya didn't know mah brother."

"I _do _know you," he whispers, casting a glance over to Carol who was lingering in the doorway, sweeping the same spot longer than necessary. Daryl looks about ready to protest, nose crinkling with the stirrings of frustration. Rick wasn't having any of it. "And I like to think you know me, too."

Daryl's emotions were fickle. It was a survival adaptation, of that Rick was sure; everything about the man was quick to change, to mold to the situation at had, on his toes and guarding himself from all things threatening from violence to simple offense. He wasn't normally this quick to irritate, but Rick_ had _mentioned his brother, so it was his own fault really.

"_Do_ you know me, Daryl?"

There was more there in those words, more than even Rick knew, because the expression on Daryl's face pinched not with irritation but with some other rare emotion, struggling with his words. The two of them had an understanding about how words couldn't always illustrate thoughts, not like actions could, but sometimes they were necessary. Daryl struck Rick as the kind of man who spent most of his life thinking things he didn't have the strength to say.

That was why, after adapting to his brother no longer being around, he really was a good man. Carol had seen it, Dale had seen it, and Rick finally allowed himself to see it after finding his past judgements of good men were somewhat warped. Gullible, Lori had called him once.

The look in Daryl's unusual eyes when he forces himself to meet Rick's stare is full of messy thoughts and emotions that don't quite click together, but Rick can only read it as sincerity. "Yeah. Yeah, I know you," Daryl concedes, and perhaps there's just a lick of cruel honesty in his voice when he continues, "you're a half-crazy son'bitch cowboy that collects broken people and tries to keep 'em alive in an expired world; ya need ta shave somethin' serious and ya smell like walker guts; ya do the things that need doin' like killin' your best friend and excommunicating yer own wife, but ya don't take care of yourself. You care too much for others and not enough for your own damn life. You're also the best damn father your boy could ask for in a world like this."

For a man who keeps his thoughts to himself unless asked, Daryl truly had a lot more to say than even Rick gave him credit for. He sat there, staring like an idiot, not sure how to react to the mixed feelings of guilt and happiness and indignation and affection, but no one reaction seemed right.

Carol wasn't sweeping anymore.

Daryl sets the gun down – it's Glenn's, Rick realises – and gives a wry smile that was equally as unamused as it was. "I'm just the _other _Good Man."

He leaves the four cleaned guns on the table, slides his own – the one he'd been saving for last - down the back of his jeans, and walks off. He's already gone for so long that he was probably raiding the tombs of the prison while Rick continued to sit there, staring at the neat row of shining weapons and tumbled the words over and over, processing the compliment and the revere.

He decided the tightness in his chest had to be a good feeling.

.:.

* * *

Daryl prefers silent companionship. He may no longer bite back at most small talk, but he still moves quick to unravel the foundations of a discussion. That wasn't to say he tensed up and glared when someone was in his general proximity. His personal space was a different story, and even Rick had felt a few of those hair-raising 'back the fuck off' stares, though they came less and less and that had to mean something, right?

Daryl doesn't really trust them completely, even after all this time, but Rick refuses to take that personally. It was just a part of the man, like his scars and his crossbow were a part of him. Over time, however, Daryl started seeking them out more, involving himself in the hard decisions and taking it upon himself to learn about his fellow survivors.

That was when Rick learned Daryl considered 'spending time together' and 'bonding' was something that could be done perfectly in complete silence. The word 'introvert' sprang to mind, and for a while Rick compared it to each new aspect of Daryl's personality that surfaced, before deciding it was exactly what he was.

The man was hard to get close to, but something about his personality was so dynamic that it was hard to resist. Perhaps it was the underlying mystery, the knowledge that there was so much more to him than he let on. When Daryl liked someone, you really could tell.

He liked Glenn first. It was subtle, but more surprising was that Merle's arrogant racism hadn't rubbed off on Daryl in quite the way they'd all thought. Daryl repeated things, said what his brother wanted to hear. He was Merle's mouthpiece, repeating the words he'd heard over and over, but there was no conviction. He never once called T-Dog a nigger, or looked at him like he was any less for being of a different race. In fact, all 'Chinaman' and 'Asian' jokes were in good humour, which was really the first sign that Daryl somewhat liked the kid.

Glenn caught on, sometime between Atlanta and Hershel's Farm he thinks, because he didn't seem to mind so much by then.

"Any man who can hold 'is own and survive is alright by me," Daryl had replied once when asked about why he never really absorbed the white supremacist attitude he'd been raised with.

Carol and Sophia were next, and even to this day Rick couldn't quite tell if Daryl had imagined himself taking Ed's place as husband and father, or if he'd, in some twisted and completely human way, seen a resemblance in Carol to his own mother. Rick wasn't even going to bother attempting to assess Daryl's complex mental web; something – _probably his collection of deliberate scars_ – tells him the man needed a shrink long before the world went to shit. He was making do with whatever insanity party was going on in his brain, and that was true strength.

Daryl was the kind of person who was so fiercely loyal over those he called his own that it had the potential to terrify. Daryl would kill for him and for anyone else in what was left of their group, and not just game or the walking dead, either.

Rick found him out by the bike, cleaning it up. It was something Daryl often did these days, now that they were safe within the prison walls. He cleaned things; his crossbow, the guns, knives, his bike...anything to keep his hands busy. It was understandable, seeing as they hadn't had the opportunity to stay in once place for long until now, that he'd go a bit stir-crazy, and it was appreciated that he was doing simple things to keep his mind off the world beyond the gates.

The day Daryl considered leaving them from sheer boredom was the day Rick failed the one person he couldn't afford to.

"You can clean out the cars, too, if you want something else to do," Rick says, hoping Daryl would take it as a joke or something equally as non-provoking.

Daryl pauses cleaning the spokes of his rims, one eye squinted from the harsh sunlight, and scoffs. "Do I look like yer slave?" he says, just as breezily, and Rick shrugs, sitting down on the gravel a few feet away, heels of his boots grinding small stones into the dirt as he crosses his legs.

"Most slaves are cleaner," Rick comments, picking a small rock out of the ground.

"Whores aint," Daryl retorts. Rick can't help but snort out a quiet laugh, and the two of them fall into the same easy companionship Daryl enjoyed sharing with him. He keeps his back to Rick, but there's no tension there in his bare arms as he continues to work, the metal starting to shine like new right before his audience's eyes. Rick watches the way Daryl prides over the machine, his last reminder of his brother, and wonders if the man would do something like that to mourn him if he died. Would Daryl keep something of Rick's?

Did he have something to keep?

The question, though unanswerable, left him feeling oddly warm.

Daryl showing such fondness for a lifeless pile of metal shouldn't be so interesting, but it is. It truly is.

"Ya need somethin'?" Daryl asks, turning to peer over his glistening shoulder, tendrils of overgrown hair plastered crookedly to his brow from being swiped at, and in that one moment, Rick feels something familiar shoot toward the ends of his nerves. He grabs his thigh with a sweaty hand and bites his cheek to keep from answering straight away.

It took a tenth of a second to recognise the spark shooting through him to be lust, imagining those eyes watching him over a naked shoulder, sweating, panting. Ugly, misplaced lust.

Daryl's eyes linger, and the reaction dims, until Rick feels a little disgusted with himself. He's already forgotten the question, but Daryl's waiting for some kind of human response from him, so he gives it.

"You don't talk much," he says softly.

Daryl's eyebrows shoot up. He shakes his head once and returns back to his work. "Thanks for tellin' me, _Chatty Cathy. _Never would'a noticed," Daryl drawls, and Rick feels himself flush though he's not entirely sure what he's feeling embarrassed about. Daryl fiddles for a few moments, until he sighs, setting a hand on the leather seat in thought. When the hand slips off and he turns around, still in a crouch and balancing on his heels in a way that made the movement more of a waddle than a step, an imprint of his sweat is left on the leather, gleaming distractingly. "You an' me, we're different to most people. We all are. We're the survivors."

Rick tries very hard not to look at the bead of sweat rolling down Daryl's throat. "But why don't you ever say anythin'."

"Probably the same reason you don't. None of us do," Daryl points out. "Your li'l boy in there? When I was his age, I talked off the ear of whoever'd listen. Couldn't shut me up if ya tried."

"What happened?"

"Pa decided he didn't like tha sound of mah voice," Daryl replies, a tightness lifting his eyes into a narrower squint, until they were merely shadows on his face. "Merle told me only women talked when no one was listenin'. Now, it's survival, always was. Noise kills ya, an' words can tear everythin' down. Ya stay alert, ya stay close, and that's how ya pull through."

"We're safe here, Dare."

"Nowhere's safe from words, Rick."

It was another loaded statement, and just like every one Daryl throws at him, he can't stop thinking about it, taking it apart syllable by syllable, and puzzling it together until it fits this characterisation his mind has created for the man crouching in front of him. The man who, apparently, isn't done throwing Rick's mind for a loop.

"Ya know, I figured somethin' out, not long after all this started," he says with a wave of the socket wrench in his hand that Rick hadn't noticed him picking up, "it's that those that don' think, talk. Those that don' talk, think. That's why we're the ones that survived, Rick. Because we think rather than talk."

"Lori always told me to talk more," Rick says softly, and Daryl immediately turns back to the bike, slipping the spanner into the bag resting on the ground and scooping up the cloth he'd been using to wipe the chrome. "She always had something to say. Shane always had something to say."

"So do you," Daryl points out, "an' so do I. But we keep it ta ourselves because who else is gon' listen?"

"Lori and Shane are dead, and I'm not," Rick says, voice coming out hard even though he isn't aware of feeling any anger. "You saying we survived and they didn't because they weren't like us?"

"Not often it happens, but ah've been right before," Daryl says in reply, standing up suddenly. He's bouncing on the balls of his feet, like there wasn't enough blood in his legs, and Rick can see the line of muscles clenching in his thighs through his jeans. "I'm'a gon' go clean them cars. Glenn got some walker blood on 'is durin' the last run into town."

He nods to Rick without really looking at him and leaves, running the rag over each of his fingers individually the same way he does after gutting a rabbit or changing the oil. Rick doesn't stand up until a few minutes later when Carol comes to ask about the hot water pump rig they've been trying to set up for a few days.

.:.

* * *

It started happening without Rick's notice, continued without his consent, then only got worse when he realised just how much he wanted it. Physical contact with the others didn't fizzle under his skin the same way a small brush of Daryl's hand on his chest did. A smile from Beth or Carl didn't give him that deep jolt the way the half quirk of Daryl's thin lips sometimes granted. At first the reactions disgusted him, but he started craving them. They made him feel alive like nothing else had since seeing his baby daughter's face for the first time.

It started completely by accident, before Rick even realised what he was doing.

"Y'all know how ta play poker?" Daryl asks, tossing a cardboard carton on the table after dinner. Glenn jolts, then reaches for the pack. Hershel gives the hunter a smile that isn't returned, and replies.

"Haven't played since before Maggie was born," he says, "I gave that up with my drinking."

"I've never played," Glenn admits, and Maggie stares at him with the look of disbelief they often give one another. "What? I haven't!" It was a stinging reminder that they hadn't known a damn thing about one another before they fell in love, and they were still strangers in many ways, but they made it work.

Rick thought it was a small, beautiful advantage.

"I was never very good," Rick confesses, and Daryl rolls his eyes.

"Y'all borin' son'bitches," he jeers, and slides his long legs over the bench and into the space beside Rick, slotting himself in where everyone knew he belonged. "Ne'er met more uncultured people in mah entire damn life."

"And where, exactly, did you grow up?" Maggie quips, and Daryl closes up with a half-hearted glare he always gave when asked about his past.

"Whatever. I aint got time ta teach y'all how ta not lose pathetically. Got another game."

He must've found the pack in town when he went on a run a few days ago, because never before had Rick or anyone else at the table laid eyes on that deck of cards, and they looked too new to have been in their possession for too long. There were no betting chips in sight anyhow, so maybe Daryl had been counting on their reply.

No one was really in the mood for games tonight; they'd had a breach of walkers that had nearly lost them Daryl's life, but being that the man they were all so terrified for was sitting here now, bandage around his wrist and a few stitches in his side, they had no choice but to humour him.

Rick, for one, wasn't quite sure what the hell Daryl was trying to do – he'd screamed louder than anyone when he'd seen the man go down, and Daryl had heard it, saw it, and kept on giving him these looks. Aside from the obvious, all Rick could think about was four days ago, listening to him talk about how he always had something to say. He wondered if this was Daryl's way of saying that 'something'.

He looked so enthusiastic while he dealt out the cards to everyone there. Carol was nursing Judith to sleep, Beth was in her cell reading, and Carl was on watch – he'd insisted a week ago that he should be allowed to take it, and Rick had been giving him a few hours every couple of days after seeing Daryl nod in agreement. Seeing Daryl's approval had washed away the sounds of Lori's scolding voice. Carl had every right to learn how to survive, and to feel as though he was contributing to that survival. Daryl's opinion was much more profound than that of any ghost, even if that ghost haunting him was his dead wife.

"We're not gambling, are we?" Glenn asks, and Axel speaks directly to Daryl for the first time Rick had ever witnessed.

"Yeah, what'd we bet with?"

Daryl gives the ex-inmate a hard look. "Whatever you got."

Rick thinks back on the morning, remembering watching Carol brush off the inmate's not-so-vague flirtations after determining she was in fact not a lesbian, and seeing the way Daryl watched on like a hawk. He chose to ignore the jealousy he felt burning up beneath his collar.

Maggie pulls the cards toward her and shuffles them into a neat stack, then pulls out a full clip of ammunition from her hip and places it on the table. "I'm in," she says, and Daryl smirks, both turning and looking to Glenn with the same expression of challenge. Glenn rolls his eyes with that same resigned look he gets when he's asked to do something dangerous that no one else has the balls to do.

"Fine," he groans, and searches his pockets for something. He pulls out an unopened packet of spearmint chewing gum, and Rick finds himself checking his own pockets. How fucked up was the world when some chewing gum was more exciting than money?

In the end, Oscar opts to just watch the game, and Hershel excuses himself for bed, their cards being divided equally amongst the others who chose to play. Daryl reluctantly places a handmade leather pouch on the table, with something in it but Rick doesn't bother asking. Axel gives up a few cigarettes, though they're crinkled and one looks like it'd been lit for a few seconds. Rick puts a roll of plain lip balm and two hair elastics down, which Maggie squints at eagerly. He'd been meaning to give them to her anyway.

Daryl tells them how the game works.

"Last one left with the joker loses," he says, "keep goin' till there's jus' one of us left. Ya take a card from the person to ya right, give one to the person to your left, and put down any pairs. Suits don' matter." As demonstration, he puts down a pair he already had in his stack, two mismatched sevens staring up at them. Rick has two pairs and Glen has one, and then they start.

Axel loses the first round, and pouts off the loss of his cigarettes even while Oscar slaps him on the back with a laugh. Glenn loses next, an uncharacteristic swear when he realises he's picked the wrong card from Rick's hands which gives him away. Maggie follows, and glares hard at them both at the loss, but everyone else is laughing and cheering on the game.

By now, it's just Rick and Daryl facing each other, and now that they both got the hang of the game, and both are down to their final cards. Daryl has the joker, and two more cards, the matches to Rick's, and he can feel the sweat starting to prickle. The others have started a steady chant, with Glenn and Oscar cheering for Daryl and Axel for Rick. Maggie's still glaring passive-aggressively.

Daryl takes his three, sets down a pair, and then it's Rick's move, but all he can do is stare at the bandage around Daryl's wrist, realising that in the past half-hour he hadn't thought once about the fact he'd almost lost this man today. Eventually, after what must've taken too long, Daryl kicks his ankle lightly with a socked foot –_ he must've slipped his boots off during the game_ - and startles him.

"Just a game, man. Take a damn card," he demands, but he seems happy enough. Without thinking, Rick takes the first card he sets his eyes on, and breathes heavily when he sees he's grabbed the one Daryl purposely set higher than the other. It's the joker, staring up at him with that leering face, and it's all Rick can do to glare up at the ceiling.

Daryl snatches the ace out of his other hand and slaps the pair down atop the pair of threes, then leans back and throws his arms outward like some kind of champion. "Yeah, that's right bitches, I win!"

Glenn and Oscar are cheering, and Rick can only groan through the grin that's starting to tease his mouth. It's a surprise to see Daryl so self-satisfied, to see that fire of life flickering into his eyes, one that'd seemed so long lost on him. He takes a look around, sees the content back on the faces of the people around him, and something about it just _itches_.

Just five hours ago, for fear of losing him if he should look away even once, Rick had cut the image to memory of Daryl lain out on Hershel's bed, staring hollowly up at the underside of the bunk above with his pursed mouth the only sign of a flinch as Carol's steady hand stitched up the wound between two lower ribs. Twenty minutes before that, he'd watched Daryl go down, and the walker fall atop of him in an awkward crumple against the wall. Today, he'd almost lost Daryl, and for hours the entire group had been consumed with this tangible air of remorse and mourning for a man who was still perfectly alive.

Daryl does something completely unexpected with the next breath.

"Al'ight, stop lookin' at me like tha'," he says with a chuckle, tossing Glenn's gum back at him, holding out the ammunition with the other hand to the glowering young woman. Everyone blinks in surprise. "What? I aint got use for this shit. Y'all can 'ave it back. 'cept for you," he says, looking to Rick while he hands over the hair elastics and the chap stick to Maggie. He takes one of the cigarettes, the worst crinkled one, and hands the other five back to Axel, who's smiling happily enough.

Rick watches as Daryl untangles himself from the bench, slipping the cigarette between his lips unlit, and slides the cards back in their carton, straightening them as he went. Axel strikes a match and holds out the flame expectantly, to which Daryl gives the other man a raised-brow look, then bends over, cupping his hands around the flame to light it. He gives Axel one of his rare nods, the kind that meant everything between them was sorted out now, and the ex-inmate shakes the match out without losing his look of cheer.

Daryl stands and watches for a moment much the way Rick had, sees Glenn and Maggie smouldering one another with their loving gaze, sees Oscar and Axel joking amongst themselves, but his look of self-satisfaction hasn't left yet. The others must notice he's still standing up sometime during the moment he scoops up the small leather pouch, stares at it, and drops it in Rick's lap like some kind of consolation prize. Rick shoves it in his pocket without looking inside.

"Daryl?" Glenn asks, both he and Maggie staring openly, even as the young woman is scooping her hair up into a short ponytail at the back of her head.

"Maybe now y'all can stop lookin' like a sack o' miserable fuckin' shits," Daryl says, and everything cools down a few degrees. "Lookit me. Ah'm alive, alright? 'm fine. Aint no walker out there gonna get a piece a this sweet ass, so chill tha fuck out."

Suddenly everything makes sense. Daryl wasn't the kind of man comfortable with being fussed over, and if people cared about him he preferred they did it in secret and didn't tell him about it. It was a weird way of functioning within a group so starved for affection that they could probably all use a few moments to hug it out, and Rick was no exception. If a mere brush of Daryl's foot on his ankle could send his pulse hammering, perhaps he was more eager for touch than he'd first thought.

And here Daryl was, in his own way, showing he understood, showing he cared in the same obscure stream he did everything. He didn't want anyone to be sad, especially not for his sake.

He slaps a hand to Rick's shoulder, passing by on his way to the cell block, the touch grazing fingertips across the nape of Rick's neck, and everything suddenly becomes much too loud.

"G'night," Daryl mumbles almost shyly while he breathes out a stream of smoke, but he nods to the group nonetheless and vanishes from the room. There is silence for a few seconds before Glenn bursts out with a laugh.

"Rick, you broken?" he jests. Rick can only bring his hand up to the base of his neck, searching his warm skin for any trace that Daryl had accidentally touched him whatsoever. It felt kind of like a lie that the grazed flesh felt no different to the rest, like there wasn't a stream of molten lava right beneath it, burning through the invisible marks seared into him.

This was the very moment Rick realised just how intensely he wanted Daryl Dixon.

.:.

* * *

**A/N:** I don't think I mentioned this in the first chapter, but Part I was actually a prologue of sorts. The rest of the story will continue much the way this chapter is written, significant scenes taken from either hours or days or weeks apart. I've deleted a couple of scenes that had absolutely no relevance to the story, and decided to just follow on with this style of writing. I never intended to write this story in 'real-time', but you can basically assume that the amount of time between scenes is significant to the progress of Rick and Daryl's relationship.

Thankyou to everyone who reviewed, and to **Whitefox**, thankyou so much! I will take you up on your offer for constructive crit, but I do have a request and that is for you to critique the whole work when it's finished. I enjoy crit because I never actually learned how to write in school - I taught myself, and I'm nowhere near an expert at it, but if I want to get better, reality is necessary for my growth as a writer. However, I discourage easily, mostly because of the lack of support I've had to deal with from people in my life, people telling me to give up writing because it's useless and wont get me anywhere (and I've had to deal with that a lot, from family, friends, and partners). If I get criticism every chapter I'll just start fretting about every update and considering most of the story's already written, I might not even finish publishing it. I'd rather be told what I can do better next time, so that I can start an entire story in that fashion. So if you are still sticking with the story by the end, I would very much enjoy a long, honest review. Again, thankyou so much for offering!

I hope you enjoyed the update! **Chapters will be posted weekly on Monday night (Australia time)** until the story is finished, at which point I'll either continue to upload weekly or I'll up it to bi-weekly until it's all published. Mostly to buy myself some time to finish writing _Darlin'_.

**MK**


	3. Sapien III : Animalia

**Sapien**

_Part III : Animalia_

.:.

For a lack of anything better to do, Rick decided to take the dried washing off the lines to save Carol the trouble. She was looking tired these last few days, staring out into the overcast sky like there was something else to be seen in the clouds, and the twinge he felt at seeing her like that reminded him of other times, such as when Lori's pregnancy started to show or when Daryl caught a cough during the winter.

Lori had looked as though the life was being sucked out of her, like the baby inside her was taking everything she had. Her elbows started to stick out awkwardly and her collarbone cast deep shadows over her chest, until her body seemed almost as garish to look at as a walker's. Daryl came back successful from a desperate four-day hunt out in the cold, but had fallen asleep before eating a single mouthful, chill from the exposure driving the blood from his face and setting a shiver into his bones, until finally each breath began to wheeze and coughs rattled wetly in his chest. Lori had talked very seriously about smothering the man in his sleep so that he wouldn't bring walkers down on them, which only drove Rick's disgust toward her even deeper. She stood there, anemic and whittled away from starvation, livid with fear and looking like she'd sooner fall over than have the strength to hold a pillow over Daryl's face.

Daryl recovered in six days, and no one told him of Lori's madness, but while he soon returned to himself, Lori continued to fade away to skin and bone, pregnant belly looking unnatural enough to make them cringe if they stared too long.

Carol was neither starving nor sick, but there was a tiredness there that made Rick ache with guilt.

The pegs were sun-bleached and many of them had pieces of plastic broken away from them, sharp enough to cut if you weren't careful. Rick wonders if perhaps mundane chores were more tedious and bloodthirsty than the tasks he'd taken upon himself while he sucks at a spot of blood welling beside his forefinger nail. "Damn," he mutters, inspecting the small bead swelling dark against his reddening skin, smearing it just slightly with his thumb.

A sudden growl and metallic rattle shoots through his ears unexpectedly, making him jump and a hand jolt to the gun holster at his hip. Whipping his gaze around, he finally sees the commotion. On the other side of the fence, a lone walker was hissing and teething the metal, bloodshot greyed eyes staring almost through Rick, through the spot of blood on his finger.

Morbidly, he finds himself walking over to it without any conscious plan, other than perhaps to prove once more that these things really are dead and mindless. There was no spark of humanity left in those things, he can't really see how he'd ever thought there was. He finds himself face-to-face with the creature before he'd even noticed himself stopping, toes of his boots barely a foot away from the fence.

He realises with a certain detached sickness that the closer he got, the more rabidly the thing behaved, snarling and slamming its hands against the wire.

Rick brings his finger to the fence, and swipes the drop of blood over one of the links, staining the wire scarlet. The walker's grey tongue instantly laps at the blood, gurgling through it's decaying throat where the bite mark is clear against its pale skin.

His knife is buried in the thing's eye socket before he has a chance to second guess himself.

"Ya best be watchin' yourself, dickin' 'round like that," Daryl's voice says behind him, unusually loud. Rick hadn't even heard him approach, too intent on the snarling walker. He whirls around guiltily, though part of the nervy fluttering could be put down to Daryl's presence alone rather than what he'd been caught doing. "Ah don't think these things really learned tha rule not ta bite tha hand that feeds ya."

"I wasn't feeding it," Rick protests.

"You were playin' with it."

"I killed it, didn't I?" Rick points out, not bothering to deny he'd taunted the walker first. Daryl looks between him and the walker and back again, scoffs back a faint laugh, and sheaths the hunting knife Rick hadn't even noticed he'd been holding.

"So ya did."

Rick moves around Daryl with his eyes lowered, hoping not to let the other man notice how out of it he actually was in that moment. Sure, he tended to zone out during housework back in the old world, but this couldn't possibly be it. Daryl's boot tread crunched the gravel into the concrete, and Rick stooped to pick up the faded cane basket, handing it to the man behind him.

"Gimme a hand," he demands, going straight back to the line of washing before he could wince at his own tone of voice. Knowing Daryl, the man would probably have only smirked in response anyway.

"Sure thing, boss," Daryl retorts, and there's a creak of dry cane as he cocks the basket against his hip, holding it up against the bone with only his wrist, fingers tapping some unheard tune against the wicker. Rick tosses a dish towel into the basket with a look he hoped was condescending, but probably wasn't. Daryl met his gaze, after all, and all he could think about then was the way Daryl had peered over his bare shoulder while cleaning the bike.

They stay in silence for a while, Daryl shoving the cleaned clothes and rags and bandages down far enough to make room for everything, until finally one of Glenn's new shirts - even so, it already had a small tear in the shoulder hem - sat atop and they were done.

Daryl stares down at the basket tucked under his arm for a moment, then shoves it out toward Rick's gut. His hands snap up on reflex to grab it, but not before his abdominals copped the faint thrust of the timber handle. It wasn't aggressive, rather it might've been playful if Daryl was that kind of man, which he sometimes was but only very rarely. Apparently today was one of those days.

"You'll make a good housewife," Daryl drawls, and Rick bats out a hand to smack him on the firm shape of his shoulder. "What? Dun' worry, ah'll demand a high dowry."

"You'd miss me too much to marry me off," Rick responds without thought. Daryl seems to do the same.

"Guess ah'll just marry ya myself, then," the other man replies, like it's no big deal, like he spoke like this all the time. The others already commented that they were attached at the hip, and if people weren't so suspicious of Carol and Daryl's enigmatic relationship the 'married couple' jokes probably would've started a lot earlier. This was probably the catalyst right here, and Rick found he didn't mind whatsoever.

"You wouldn't handle me," he toys, "I'm far too high maintenance."

"Ya jus' think that," Daryl says, cocking out a hip, "all y'all city-slickers never been with a real man. Y'all dun' know what you're missin'."

"That an offer?" Rick asks, moving the basket out of the way before he can help himself, tucking well into Daryl's personal space. The very same personal space he seems to pull out all the stops with when invaded. For a brief second, Daryl looks uncomfortable, like he might reach out and shove Rick away, but it's a short-lived reaction. Too quickly the hunter notices the way Rick's voice had lost that lilt of playfulness in his final rebound, and something dark swifts across his face.

He puts three feet of space between them, adjusts the strap of his crossbow for something to focus on, and nods toward the entryway where Hershel stood, enjoying the sun on his face and no doubt watching their odd interaction.

"Best get ya inside 'fore ya start screwin' around with the neighbours again," he grumbles out, his tone flat and unreadable, and Rick has nothing else to respond with than a nod of agreement, grabbing the washing basket properly and walking behind the other man, making no move to keep up with him.

The look he gets when they pass the crippled old man says he'd noticed the way Rick had brashly approached his friend, and whether or not he thought they were just talking or he knew what'd been going on in Rick's head, he couldn't tell.

He just knew Daryl gave him an odd look that night when he'd told everyone he was going to his cell early, like he'd been talking to Daryl and no one else. Like he'd been_ insinuating_ something that only Daryl understood.

.:.

* * *

Carol and Rick were the only people who ever saw the inside of Daryl's personal space boundaries.

Like most people, Daryl only really considered it to be his personal space if it was within the span of his arms. He'd stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Carol, nudge her with a hip or a shrug when she tried to string out a playful moment, but most of his physical contact came from sitting by Rick with their entire sides pressed together so tight they could feel each small shift of movement. They were the only people Daryl had deemed would never hurt him, intentionally or otherwise. Even soft-spoken, harmless little Beth made Daryl flinch the first time she hugged him in thanks for bringing back fresh meat during the winter.

Rick was relieved to see that nothing had changed after their unusual little game ran into unfamiliar overtime. The next morning, Daryl had slotted into the seat right beside Rick, despite there being every other space around the table clear, and started scoffing down his canned roast beef and a few spoonfuls of sweet corn kernels that he ended up siphoning from Rick's plate. He ate with his arm out and head hunched down, like he was protecting his food or his face, and usually cleaned up whatever was in front of him in a matter of minutes without a word on the taste.

If Daryl had a sense of taste, no one knew of it.

Everything was perfectly normal between them. In fact, it was better than normal. When Rick handed Daryl the rest of his plate of corn and asparagus, because he really wasn't in the mood for eating anything anyway, Daryl chuckled. "Told ya you'd make a good wife," Daryl jokes just as Oscar and Axel come into the room. They are within hearing distance but they don't pay any attention to their conversation. "I'm the provider, and you're tha one who puts it all on a plate for me."

"You have a warped idea on what marriage really is," Rick says, cocking his brow at the man beside him. Daryl wipes his thumb over his lips.

"Nah, think I got it 'bout right. Live in one another's back pockets while remainin' celibate? Aint that marriage?"

Rick snorts, covering his mouth with the back of his hand. Axel sits across from them right then and there, flicking dirty blonde hair out of his eyes. "What's goin' on?" he asks, sounding strangely eager. Oscar lingers for a second before sitting a space away from his fellow ex-inmate.

"Just debating whether or not I'm Daryl's forest wife."

"He is," Daryl insists on reflex, still in the mood to toy with people. It was a weirdly normal part of his personality that the others only saw on the rare occasion, but Oscar and Axel hadn't even glimpsed it before now, and were obviously unsure what to make of it.

"I can see that," Axel reluctantly nods along, like he's not sure whether or not he should say anything.

Daryl's eyes narrow. "Ya sayin' ah look like a queer?" he hisses. All Rick really registers is that he doesn't spit out the word 'faggot' like he'd always imagined he or Merle would.

Axel stutters and drops his spoon back on his plate of beans.

Daryl's face twists for a second, like he's about to glare or sneeze or something, but what comes out is a rough chuckle. "Dun' shit yerself, man. Ah'm just kiddin'."

"Oh man," Axel gushes out a sigh of relief, "why would you even do that to me!" Daryl digs back into the plate of Rick's leftovers and lets the ex-inmate fend for himself. "Man, I didn't mean nothin' by it. Y'all don't look queer."

Oscar speaks up suddenly. "Gay ain't a colour. You can never really know," he says, looking right at Rick, "sometimes people like that can surprise you."

Oscar isn't the only one looking at Rick. Peering up from his crouch over his second serving of food, Daryl's eyes scan over Rick's torso just a moment before coming back to his face, a heaviness in his eyes like he feels the need to say something.

He doesn't say anything.

.:.

* * *

"Ya got it so far, kid?"

"I...think so."

"Again."

"Clean it so it doesn't rust, sharpen it so it don't get-"

"Wha' was that?"

"...so it _doesn't_ get blunt, sheath it- wait...how come _you_ don't have to talk all proper like?"

"'cause I'm illiterate, kid. Yer daddy won' be impressed if ya start talkin' like me as well as swearin'."

"Everyone likes the way you talk."

Daryl snorts. "Tha' so?"

"Mmhm. Hey, Daryl...how come you're always tryin' ta impress my dad?"

"...don't be askin' questions you ain't got no business knowin' the answer to."

"Why ain't it my business?"

"What'd I just say?"

Carl sighs.

"Yer daddy's done better by me than most. I owe him more than he knows."

"But-"

"Brat, shut up and get back to cleanin' those damn knives. Already said more 'n I should'a."

"Yessir."

Rick edges back along the concrete wall when he hears the sound of a knife against wood, Daryl carving more bolts while he taught Carl what he wanted to know, disappearing back down the corridor and slipping into his cell.

If he sat there for a few minutes, straining his hearing for the sound of Daryl carving or Carl's chatter, it was only for him to know anyway.

.:.

* * *

Until now, it'd just been a distant want that rose to the occasion, sometimes quite literally, whenever Daryl happened to speak too close to his ear or accidentally brushed against him. It hadn't even been happening for too long, but the sensations he craved were coming stronger and more often, each featherlight sense of the other man's proximity pushing his restraint just that smallest bit closer to the tipping point.

For most of his life, Rick had been quite familiar with intimate touch, though not particularly experienced with it. That he'd married Lori so young, before he'd ever had the chance to be with anyone else, it wasn't all too surprising really that their sex life had died down after the first two years of marriage, then steadily decreased over time. In the end, sex had been spontaneous every few weeks, with the occasional 'date night' planned between them, until there were no more date nights and there was no spontaneity left in either of them. For about a year before the turn, Lori battled more 'headaches' than she'd ever collectively experienced in her entire life, and Rick himself was more 'tired' than when Carl was a squalling infant that liked to holler on the hour every hour.

Either way, he was used to having a warm body in his bed and a willing partner whenever the, albeit rare, mutual fancy struck. Rick didn't think he was the kind of man who'd use the excuse that he had 'needs', but he was steadily finding out that it was true, just perhaps not in the sense that most would've claimed.

Sexual release was something he could've found all by himself with some privacy and a clean hand. But being able to surrender control, to feel alive because someone else was touching him, that was what he needed. Every time he held Judith in his arms, he felt that thundering in his chest, his heart finally pounding with all the love he feared he'd lost, but it wasn't enough. Paternal instincts weren't enough to keep him going.

He desired Daryl - something that was strangely easy to admit to himself. There was no identity crisis, no reminders that he was still married to Lori even though she was dead, there wasn't even a set plan on whether or not to attempt seducing the man who was more than likely straighter than the edges of the arrows strapped to his side.

He loved Daryl. Perhaps not in the way of lovers, but there was a point where loyalty and trust just no longer covered the boundaries of their friendship. Without Daryl, he'd be lost, destined to sink further into himself than the man would ever allow so long as he was at his leader's side. They were family, and they loved one another dearly, more than either would admit thanks to their macho prides.

Their evolution into survivors was not limited to their ability to crack through a skull with a knife, but also into their desperation to keep one another alive. Maybe this was the natural next step between them after all.

Rick made his decision stupidly, hastily, and in the dead of night, sought the elusive Daryl Dixon out. He already knew exactly where to find the hunter, which certainly aided in his search.

He was up in the dark watch tower, leaning back against the window, arms stretched above his head and eyes closed as he worked out the kinks, when Rick pushed the hatch open beside his feet.

"Lonely?" Daryl asks in a strained tone without even missing a beat, arms still high above his head, back arched like a damn cat, shirt pulling up over his abdomen just barely enough to see a slip of skin Rick would've been more clear-headed without seeing. There are only two candles lit up here, otherwise it would be too bright to see through the windows and keep an eye on the fences, not to mention the fear of other survivors, but that faint ambient light was enough to set that small area of skin aflame.

"Thought you might be," Rick teases, sounding grittier than he'd hoped. He clears his throat, sets the rifle on the floor of the watch tower, then pulls himself up the rest of the way, sitting on the edge and focusing on his own hands to keep his stare off Daryl. It'd been such a second nature to stare at the other man, even before he started to feel the warmth of lust's kindle, so it was just that much harder than it needed to be to avoid looking at him now.

Daryl lets out a groan of pleasure, and Rick's eyes jolt up, watching the man roll his shoulders back against the cool glass, then finally release his stretch. Rick sat there, on the lip of the trap door, feet still hanging below, and promptly forgot exactly why he was trying to avoid staring at his friend.

"Ah, what the hell," Daryl shrugs, like it didn't bother him either way. He looks at Rick for the first time, and gestures with his head. "C'mon, up with ya, 'fore ya fall or somethin' an' I have to scrape yer brains off the concrete. How tha hell would I explain that to yer kids?"

"Always looking out for me, aren't you?"

"Somebody gotta," he snorts, "yer shit at lookin' after yourself."

The metal trapdoor creaks closed, Rick being particularly careful not to drop or slam it, and soon Daryl's helping him to his feet with a strong hand in his own, other hand reaching for Rick's rifle. He lays it against the wall beside his crossbow, then resumes staring out the window he'd been stretching against. Rick comes to stand beside him, side to side like always, and just like always, Daryl doesn't look twice or flinch away. It's perfectly natural for Rick to be in his personal space, though not always appreciated - sometimes he still looked uncomfortable and sometimes he walked away, but he didn't glare so much anymore thankfully - and they'd adapted around the ways Daryl was comfortable touching other people. Side-to-side was always the easiest way to maintain contact, so Rick took what he could get.

For someone like Daryl, it was the ultimate sign of trust, a shared comfort between two men who'd barely known one another a year. Rick should have been happy with that. He should've been thrilled to be in the presence of the one man he knew whose true colours shone bright from the day they met. He wasn't.

He was greedy. His body was twisted into this unruly shape of desire, for touch and comfort and to feel alive again.

It started as simple as pressing their shoulders together rather than just letting them rest against one another. Daryl fidgets, feet spreading further apart in an attempt to carry the extra weight from the man leaning against him, but there is no negative reaction. There isn't exactly a positive one, either, but Rick's been known to take positive and neutral to mean the same thing before.

Part of why Lori was always so frustrated with him toward the end of the old world. His thoughts don't rest on her for long.

"Yer boy learns quick," Daryl comments, "he was helpin' clean the knives with me earlier. He wants me ta take 'im hunting next time I go out."

"What'd you say?"

"That I won' take 'im 'less you come too."

Daryl was great with kids, with _Rick's_ kids. Carl admired him and Judith survived because of him. In a lot of ways, Daryl was a better father to them than Rick was. He couldn't find it in himself to be jealous – he was in no position to raise two children on his own. Not in this world, not with near a dozen mouths to feed and an entire prison to keep safe.

"Thankyou," Rick whispers, pressing just a little firmer. His fingers curl up, tracing the very edge of Daryl's palm in a movement that could've been a perfectly natural mistake, or could've been a tentative grab for his hand. Whichever way Daryl took it, Rick just hoped the reaction would stay neutral, at least. "For being there for him, and for Judith. And for me."

It's only a faint movement, but there's a twitch in the way Daryl holds his head; is chin drops just slightly, and he looks down the length of his chest at their brushing hands, trying to see if Rick tracking his skin is deliberate. He moves his hand away just slightly, testing, and Rick makes the split decision to follow it with his own, hooking his fingers just faintly over two of Daryl's. A weak mesh of calloused, tentative digits.

"You're always there for me."

Daryl's eyes snap back up from the careful grab at his hand, back at Rick's face. There's a cornered look there, but no anger. No anger.

_Not yet_, Rick thinks, and brings his palm back to his own thigh, deciding the faint nudge was a hard enough shove for now. He wouldn't push this any further tonight. When Daryl lets out a carefully held breath, shaky enough to be heard in the still air between them, the kind of breath that wrenched at the chest with relief or anticipation, Rick knows he made the right choice.

Their shoulders don't touch again the rest of the night.

.:.

* * *

The walker falls to the ground at Daryl's feet, head hitting the shelves of expired chip packets on the way down and splattering the lower packets with dark mush that was just as much blood as brains, and the hunter kicks it once more for good measure. Rick would've found it funny if it hadn't been so_ close._

They and Glenn were raiding an isolated little gas station, and the only walker they'd seen since getting there had been in some kind of unconscious state until Daryl walked past the counter, pointing his crossbow behind it. It lunged, too low for Daryl to have been expecting it, but the man had the reaction time of a bloody cobra, because before Rick and Glenn could blink, Daryl had cracked its head on the counter top with one hand, the other holding his precious crossbow at a safe distance.

Only Daryl, when attacked unexpectedly, would hoist his crossbow into the air like it was a glass ornament at risk of breaking rather than a lethal weapon.

The walker still got too close for comfort, and Rick found himself stumbling forward without a single thought given to Glenn standing right there, and grabbing Daryl by the back of the head, yanking him forward to inspect the small scrape on his face. The walker got close – though thankfully not _that _close - but Rick hadn't seen enough, and could only assume Daryl clipped himself in the head with the edge of his crossbow or the tip of one of his bolts by accident.

"It's not bleeding too bad," Rick says sincerely, not at all realising how relieved he sounded. More than just the _'okay, you're good? Good. Carry on'_ tone he used with everyone else. "There should be some butterfly stitches in the car."

Daryl's just staring at him, wide-eyed and blinking, but not pulling back to a more comfortable distance. They're breathing the same air now, and Rick realises that while it isn't close enough to kiss or anything like that, it's still too close to not feel the abrupt desire to surge forward and hold the other man to him. It's too close to not see that flinching feeling cross over Daryl's terse features before it soothes away with familiarity. It's also too close for Glenn's comfort, because the younger man clears his throat in much the same way Daryl would upon walking in on him and Maggie tearing into each other's clothes.

"You guys need a minute, or..." Daryl snaps back into character and yanks away from Rick's hand grasping at him, turning a vehement glare on Glenn. "It's cool, I can wait in the car if you want."

"Shut yer mouth, Mushu," Daryl growls, slinging his crossbow and storming off into another aisle, carefully avoiding the small puddle of water that'd leaked from the broken refrigerator and not completely evaporated yet. Rick watches him go with a knot of feeling in his gut.

Glenn is grinning when Rick turns to him, like everything was just the punchline to some brilliant joke, but when he sees Rick's face, something must've given him away because the grin melts off. His sloped eyes widen, and he looks over the tops of the aisles for Daryl, then takes a step closer. Rick recalls suddenly the looks that would cross Glenn's young face back at the farm, back when he was burdened with the secret of Lori's pregnancy and the oath of silence that came with it.

"Wait-"

"No," Rick cuts him off, wishing he didn't sound as angry as he irrationally felt in that moment. He wasn't mad at Glenn, or at Daryl, or even at himself – it was just the timing, the horrible situation. Even in this new world, where the end could be just hours away, it never seemed to be the right time, the right place...the right person. He sounds much more downcast this time. "Lets just get what we need and go."

Glenn doesn't at all look convinced from whatever conclusion he'd drawn, but that was okay with Rick, because he didn't have to look at the young man anymore. He had a large, empty gym bag that needed filling, and he was going to do just that, regardless of whether or not Glenn was giving him calculating looks and if Daryl wasn't looking at him at all.

.:.

* * *

**A/N:** I always get so nervous publishing in a new fandom, but responses like this one make it all completely worth it! Thankyou to everyone who reviewed, including the sweet anon reviewers, and Whitefox. I'd say more but I really need to get my beauty sleep before work tomorrow, so this Author's Note is short and sweet.

And so, the Rickyl angst commences!

**P.S.** Just made the deadline at midnight exactly! Chapters updating once a week monday nights.

**MK**


	4. Sapien IV : Chordata

**Sapien**

_Part IV : Chordata_

.:.

"I can't believe you," Daryl growls, louder than his usual neutral tone, making everyone bar Hershel and Rick jump beneath their skin. The infamous _'Atlanta'_ temper was creeping into his voice already, and Rick hadn't even said anything in his defense yet. "Yer life mean that little to ya?"

Rick rolls his eyes upward, but when Daryl slams a palm against the post of his bunk, this time he does flinch. To everyone else's surprise, and probably even Daryl's though the man hides it well, Rick finds himself apologising. "I'm _sorry_."

"They aint people. They're fucking _walkers_," Daryl stresses, trying to hammer his point home. "The rest of 'em I get, but hell, I thought at least _you_'d have some common sense in yer damn skull. Just 'cause we safe here, don't mean ya can go out them gates an' invite 'em ta dinner!"

Judith starts to sniffle and Beth quickly hurries out of the cell, followed by Maggie, both young women resembling startled deer. They must've calmed the baby down because Rick doesn't hear her start to wail, even as they keep moving. They're racing to the other end of the block, the grate of the catwalk shuddering beneath their steps, like Daryl was a bomb on a ten second countdown.

Hell, he doesn't blame them. Neither of them had ever seen Daryl angry like this, even if the group from Atlanta had several times, because by the time they made it to the Greene farm Daryl had pulled so far into himself that he only ever lashed out at Shane when he was taunted and Carol by accident. A few biting comments here and there they were all used to, particularly if he was injured or if someone had mentioned his brother recently, but Daryl was downright terrifying when his voice started to raise. It wasn't that way so much in the beginning, because Rick had written him off as a hothead just like the rest of the group had, but after so long without really seeing the violence beneath, and then having it aimed at him, even Rick could feel himself start to grow nervous beneath that sweltering glare.

"Son," Hershel cuts in when Daryl goes to continue his tirade, "do you want to help or not?"

The hunter shuts his mouth with a sour look he casts over everyone, waiting for the instruction without really agreeing to anything. From the frown that furrows his brow even further, he clearly wasn't at all expecting the old man to hand him the curved needle and the suture thread. Regardless, he takes it with a clenched jaw, the red flush along his neck already starting to recede.

"I'm getting too old to be sewing people back together. You seem the sort to know what he's doing."

Normally the needle would be in Carol's hand, but Hershel doesn't even glance once at her questioning brow, just waits for Daryl to comply with the steady gaze of a father expecting to be obeyed.

Glenn watches on from the doorway as Carol eases Rick's pants down his thighs, taking careful note of the way Daryl is the only one who politely looks away regardless of whether they'd all seen as much before, how he hesitates before kneeling, and again once more before laying a palm over the tender flesh beneath Rick's wound. Daryl looks awkward, like he wants to run from the room, and not just because he has a needle in his hand and now he has to use it, but also because his fingers are an inch too close to Rick's groin for comfort.

Glenn isn't sure if Daryl doesn't look even once at Rick's face as he forces the needle into the split flesh because he's trying to focus, or because he can't stand to look at the other man right now.

Rick hisses, but Daryl's hand clenches around the nerves of his thigh in warning. "Shut up," Daryl seethes, "you dun' get ta complain."

Amazingly, Rick bites his cheek and doesn't make a single sound other than deep, forced breaths whenever Daryl gives him a break. Neither man is aware of the bemused looks being shared behind them. When it's finished, and Daryl's tied off the thread, he stands up and shoots to the opposite wall of the cramped cell and glowers down at the other man.

"What tha hell's yer problem?" he demands, with a tone the others wouldn't dare use against their leader.

Rick gnaws on his lip one last time, even though it's already bitten red and swollen, and looks to the floor in shame. "I saw Lori. I...I had to see..."

Suddenly, Rick's reasons for waltzing out the front gate damn near unarmed were completely excusable. Hershel looks around at everyone before setting a hand on Rick's shoulder, probably understanding better than anyone present exactly how it feels to suffer the loss of a wife, but Rick only glances at the gesture then turns his eyes back to the floor, like he was about to be scolded.

"She's not real, Rick."

"I know that," Rick snaps, then sighs heavily. "I'm going crazy."

"No, you're not," Daryl grumbles.

"I saw my dead wife," Rick argues, more heat than he'd intended, "please, tell me, how that doesn't make me crazy."

Daryl gives an awkward half-shrug against the wall, glances around at the other people crammed into this tiny cell, and his face closes off completely. He wanted to say something. Rick could see it in his eyes before they cast over with a shadow when the hunter looked down, but he'd never hear it - not with everyone else in there with them, at least.

"I'm fine," he says finally, trying to get rid of the others, partly because he feels so stifled, but mostly because he wants to hear what Daryl has to say. "It was a clean shot."

"'m not sorry," the hunter mutters, finally landing that glare back on Rick's face, but it's weaker now, less anger and more stubbornness. "Dun' be expectin' no apology from me."

"You always take compliments so well?" The corner of Daryl's mouth perks up wryly, and he remembers then that Daryl did in fact have a very hard time accepting a compliment.

He recalls just how terrified he'd been to snap out of his daze with a walker clambering atop him. Its drooling, festering jaws were snapping, hiss slithering from behind its teeth and through a hole bitten in its cheek, but Rick had no gun and he couldn't reach his knife. He had only his hands, and could do nothing more than hold the rotting thing by the frame of its jaws, feeling the bone grow weak beneath his fingertips. It was enough to warp the straight line of its teeth, but not enough to crush through its skull. He was crying out, his voice echoing through the trees, and bouncing back were the replying screams of Maggie and Carl and Oscar, but all he could think was how screwed he was.

Everything was over then, and it was all because of her. She had no business haunting him. She was gone from this life, and she'd left her children with him, a son who would barely listen and a daughter whom he loved but couldn't bring himself to hold for too long. Most of the time, watching Beth carry the newborn around and seeing the way Carol would fuss and how content she got when Carl fed her, he wondered if she wouldn't be better off growing up to learn the word 'family' was more important than the word 'dad'.

Lying there, contemplating his children, a starving dead thing writhing atop him with the intent to sink its teeth into his gullet, he had only one final thought.

_Daryl._

As though that one thought had summoned him, a slicing pain lanced through something in the lower half of his body, but the walker atop him fell to the side, an arrow jutting out from just below its ribs. A kill shot, if it'd been alive, surely. Those pale white feathers, reminiscent to the replicated ones sewn on the back of Daryl's riding vest, set loose a flood of relief throughout his chest. He didn't even notice the walker rising back up to go for him again, but he did see the second arrow hiss past his head and land almost dead centre between its ghostly eyes.

"_Rick!"_ he'd heard Daryl yell his name, slamming a hand on the fence and rattling the metal. _"Here, here! Yeah, that's right, ya ugly, motherless fucks. Come get it. Oh, ya want some? Yeah? Here, have some!"_ Rick barely pulled himself up onto his elbows to see Daryl driving a bolt into the eye socket of a groaning walker by hand, straight through a link in the fence. It fell, dark blood spraying from the hole in its face, fingers raking down the fence. He loads the bloodied arrow into his crossbow, kicking at the fence to keep the walkers distracted. _"Come fucken' get it!"_

That Rick had had the second thought to yank both arrows out of the carcass beside him before he made for the gate Carl and Oscar were already pulling open for him was a miracle in itself. When Daryl had snatched them away, Rick had honestly thought that the man originally meant to punch him, and he wasn't sure if it was because Rick had retrieved his arrows or because they were in front of the others that he didn't go through with it, despite his bloodied fist clenching at his side. At that time, Rick had been the only one to see just how angry Daryl was with him, but the moment Carl had helped him limp into the prison building, the hunter kicked over a crate full of empty cans ahead of them and turned around with a look of pure fury.

Funny, for all that the cords of fear and guilt began to wrap themselves around him, he also felt conflicted with feelings of affection at the sight of that glare.

"Think you can handle the rest of it?" Hershel's voice breaks through the memories relived, and Rick feels as though he'd fallen asleep because when he snaps back to it, Glenn is gone, Carol is at the door, and Hershel is handing the sullen hunter a bottle of antiseptic and a roll of gauze. The rest of the items are already sitting on the bed, and Rick had thought the antiseptic was as well, but perhaps Daryl needed some kind of motivation.

"I can do it myself," Rick insists.

"Ya can't do anythin' yer damn self," Daryl snaps, but it comes across as an involuntary retort rather than an actual insult. Hershel's eyes are smiling even though his mouth isn't, like he already knows that Daryl will take the supplies, and he's right, though snatched is more appropriate a word for how aggressively he took them.

"What if I need to take a piss?" Rick asks, only half-joking. He was being treated like a stubborn child, and as warranted as it may be, coming from Daryl it just frustrated him even further. "You gonna hold it for me?"

Carol and Hershel were still lingering, looking in as though Rick and Daryl had their own little world the others were merely the backdrop for, waiting to see how the hostile man would react to being taunted. Daryl stares, eyes pinching narrower, and Rick cant help the desire to prod just one more time. He opens his mouth, but before he gets the chance, Daryl's unscrewed the antiseptic, and without bending down to get close, pours an excessive amount from where he stood straight onto Rick's bleeding, stitched wound.

Rick sucks in a hiss, hands flying to his thigh, but Daryl's already there, slapping them both away. "That _stings_!"

"Pussy," Daryl snorts, and Rick wants to smack him upside the head, but he doesn't, because it's true. If the situation were in reverse, not that Daryl'd be stupid enough to wind up here in the first place, he wouldn't have made a sound.

Really, people like Daryl Dixon gave off unrealistically high expectations of men. No matter how old he got, having a wound sterilized still made him gasp like a wuss.

They were alone. Rick didn't know this because he looked up, or because Carol and Hershel finally dismissed themselves, but because Daryl opened his mouth to speak. "Either ya got a death wish," he says quietly, dabbing at the stitches gentler than one would expect after his performance so far, the cotton wipe leeching with pinks and reds instantly, "or ya teamed up with tha rest of the world in tryin' ta run me into an early grave."

Daryl always looked tired. He always looked half-a-day away from collapsing into a catatonic state. Over time Rick realised that was just how Daryl looked now, the weight of his own mounting responsibilities bleeding through the cracks and onto the others' shoulders, and in fact, if he could bear to look in a mirror again, he'd probably frighten himself, too. Right now, though, he looked exhausted.

For whatever reason, this had run the last ounce of strength out of him.

"I really thought it was over, that you were done..." he tells Rick, still dabbing at the stitches. The wipe came away more pink than red now, and Daryl tossed it in the corner for Carol to pick up later, then takes up the roll of gauze and starts to wrap it around Rick's leg. At first, he simply lay the material over the tended wound, hands hovering unsurely, but before Rick could realise what his friend needed, Daryl was grabbing him with strong hands by the meat of his calves and pulling him forward onto the very edge of the bed.

Rick felt the heat like a spasm tearing through him, clenching everything south of his brain with a twisting anticipation, wounded thigh trembling with discomfort and groin throbbing just once with desire, blood pulsing right where he didn't need it to be right now. One hand fell back onto the bed, but the other flew out and landed on the junction of Daryl's shoulder. The hunter risked a look at him from where he knelt between Rick's legs, and froze.

Rick was suddenly very aware that his lips had parted, that his eyes were wide in shock, but whatever else Daryl saw in his face then - perhaps it was the desire or maybe it was something else - it made him brush the hand off his shoulder gently, until they were no longer touching one another. It was such a small distance, but it felt like miles were suddenly between them, but he couldn't think of anything to close it.

Not until his leg was bandaged.

Daryl wasn't rushing it, and even though he wasn't meeting Rick's eyes but rather staring at the wound on his leg, passing the wrap over and under, the distance Rick initially felt was shrinking slowly. It wasn't everything he might've wanted – hell, he didn't even know what he wanted – but it was enough.

What _did_ he want?

_I want him in my bed,_ Rick thinks, watching the impassive face of his friend as he stayed intent on his work, _but how much do I want him? Enough to push a little harder?_

It wasn't as though he'd really been pushing before now. A sly flirtation, a brush of hands that could've been taken either way, and a one-sided tender moment in a run down gas station off the main road. All tests, all to see just what kind of man Daryl was, and what kind of man he'd become under the circumstance. Some men, and Rick knows because he'd seen it before as a cop, weren't at all flattered when another man started paying them attention.

Rick, personally, took it as an ego boost when a man once offered to buy him a drink, not seeing his wedding ring. Shane, who had been coming back with their drinks at just that moment, had gotten a look across his face, like the stranger had spat at Rick rather than flirted with him. Rick had been quick to politely decline and show his ring. He'd even sincerely apologised, because he knew what it felt like to put yourself out there at risk of rejection.

Shane was the kind of man who'd sooner throw a punch than be flattered, and he _was_ a cop.

But what kind of man was Daryl?

The redneck was by no means stupid. Rick saw it on his face that he knew, even if it was only a suspicion right now, what exactly was going on with Rick. After he'd flirted, Daryl had walked away. After grabbing inconspicuously at his hand, Daryl had made sure not touch him overly much that night. After getting a little too close for comfort to check a superficial wound, and recovering from the initial shock, he'd ducked out of sight.

Daryl knew, perhaps only subconsciously, but at least a part of him was aware where Rick was trying to go with all of this. It wasn't an outright rejection, in fact it could only be how the hunter dealt with his confusion, or maybe he was dropping a huge hint for Rick to leave it alone and not to try anything funny, but Rick preferred to take everything as a positive unless it was a negative.

For a cop, he ran a lot of yellow lights, with his job and his wife and perhaps even in social situations. He was quick to make friends, often by nudging people back into their comfort zones and taking the lead, both with his words and his actions. Maybe running with neutral wasn't the way to go this time.

He'd never know unless he gave it a shot, and his body was literally aching for him to at least try despite the risk.

Daryl finished wrapping the bandage, holding the end in place with a warm palm, and Rick was embarrassed to feel his cock pulse, swelling just enough to be noticeable. Daryl wasn't a stupid man, and if anything was to be said in consideration of his hunting, tracking, and killing skills, it was that he was observant of his surroundings.

_All of them._

So when his eyes flickered briefly to Rick's crotch, at the visible line forming against the front of his flimsy undershorts, he knew it was too late to hide anything. Daryl quickly crimped the bandage, patted the side of Rick's thigh once, and made to stand.

Rick didn't let him, hand snapping outward and grabbing the back of Daryl's head, much the way he'd done at the gas station, pulling those startled blue eyes straight toward him. Those strange, dangerous eyes, filled with warning and discomfort, but no anger. No violence.

Warning, but not hatred.

"Thankyou," he breathes, realising he wasn't holding Daryl's head so much as grasping his hair, and tentatively lets go, holding his breath until he's sure the other man isn't going to dart off as soon as he feels he can. "Thankyou," he repeats.

"Fer stitchin' ya up?" Daryl asks, voice strangely low, sending a shiver straight through his spine and into the centre of his loins. Resisting the urge to spread his legs wider or to palm his crotch for a bit of relief, because now it was way too obvious that he was somewhat hard without drawing attention to it, he shakes his head. He wants to bite his lip in worry, a niggling thought in the back of his mind that Daryl was more likely to tear the stitches back out of his leg before giving Rick what he wanted, but he shoves the reservations away and slowly brings the hand back around, laying his palm across Daryl's dirty cheek, skin barely touching.

"For saving me...again. You're always saving me."

"...it's what we do."

"It's what _you _do," Rick insists, sure that Daryl can see his shirt vibrating with how hard and fast his heart is beating against his ribs. "For _me_. All the damn time."

"Dun' let it get to yer head," Daryl mumbles, eyes flickering down to the wrist by his face, then straining sideways toward the hand that was barely grazing his skin. He hadn't moved an inch, hadn't pulled away at all, hadn't even sneered or glared once.

Rick didn't want to know where the volts of confidence came from, whether it was from Daryl's lack of reaction one way or the other, or simply a mistakenly inflated ego, but he finally brought his palm to Daryl's cheek completely, fingertips caressing the skin behind his ear. He would do this, right now. He would show Daryl exactly what he wanted. No more pussyfooting around, waiting for the other shoe to drop or the other fist to clench.

It was all here, and now.

And then it wasn't.

Daryl whipped back from his knees and onto his heels, a hand around Rick's wrist and removing the delicate touch from his face, purposely settling the hand in the other man's lap so it obscured his partial erection, then stood up. His back to Rick, he's paused at the door before it's even registered that he'd stood up at all.

"Don't let it get to yer head," he says, as gently as a man as gruff and rough-edged as Daryl could speak, and vanishes.

Rick is still staring at the spot in front of him, where he'd so clearly seen Daryl's face, felt it against his hand, the smooth if a little oily skin, the stubble, the warmth. _Those eyes._

_Dammit._

.:.

* * *

Rick is nothing if not determined.

Any normal man might've seen that as flat out rejection, surely, but all Rick saw was the way Daryl had looked at him when they sat there, staring at one another, Rick through a window of lust and the other man reflecting something back at him that infuriatingly unreadable.

Any other man wouldn't have done half the things Rick has to keep this rag-tag group alive. Most of them would've given up or unloaded some baggage along the way, but not Rick. No, no he would prove, to himself and to Shane and Andrea and whoever thought he was too weak, that he could save everyone. He could do it.

That was just how he was. He didn't give up when normal men would.

Until Daryl told him outright to back off, Rick wouldn't give up. It's not like it was an unrequited love conquest. No, it was quite simple, really. Daryl, a man he loved like family, and apparently the only man – _only person_ – that he desired, was right in front of him, taken by no one and interested in no one. There were a million and one reasons why this man may not have it in himself to invest in a physical relationship let alone with Rick, and all of them he would respect, even if it was something as uncomplicated as Daryl simply not wanting to.

He just needed Daryl to say it once. Just once, and he'd leave it alone.

So far, all that'd happened was he'd been walked away from. Lori did a lot of that during their marriage, so seeing the back of a person he cared about wasn't unfamiliar, but the one thing he remembered about Lori always walking away was that she still crawled into bed with him every night, even if she waited until she thought he was asleep first.

Daryl could walk away all he wanted, and Rick wouldn't stop him, but in the end, he was no different to Lori or Shane or anyone else. He came back as soon as he was ready.

After a few hours, limp or not Hershel had no choice but to 'allow' Rick free reign to pick back up on his chores around the prison, and he'd spent a good part of the rest of the day hoeing at a patch of grass that they'd be making into a small garden. Glenn and Oscar raided a large hardware store a few days ago to get some hoses and plumbing fixtures, and Glenn had wandered into the overgrown gardening nursery. He ended up picking up a few dozen packets of seeds and bulbs of random vegetables, carrots and beets and tomatoes and ironically enough even a mix of pansies – so Judith would have something pretty to look at, he'd said – and the others had been thrilled.

He'd tied a bandanna around the split in his jeans, hoping for some extra support over the wound, but it still pulled tight and inched pain further and further down his leg with every other rake of the tool over the churned soil.

It was only a few hours after Daryl had walked away from him, a few hours after Rick had resolved that this wasn't the end of it, when the hunter came strolling up, crossbow over his shoulder and a hand in his pocket. He looked calm, casual, just as he would any other day, and when Rick spotted him he wondered for the moment if perhaps they'd both misread the moment.

"Yer gon' rip yer stitches," Daryl says nonchalantly, but after so long of knowing the other man, he picks up instantly on the faintest hint of worry there.

"I can sew 'em back up," he says with a shrug. Taking a deep breath, he hoists the hoe back over his shoulder, and brings it down again, slicing into the dirt. With tired arms and an aching chest, he drags the tool back toward himself.

"Don' ya even try," Daryl scolds, "I'll do it, if ah have to. Ya probably sweat right through tha bandage, too. I'm gon' have ta change that after dinner."

"I can do it," Rick insists, because somehow he just knows it'd be a repeat of what'd already happened. Daryl would accidentally touch him and the arousal would take him to a place he didn't want to be at just yet. He'd never work Daryl into the idea if he just threw it at him and asked to just fuck and get it over with.

"No, let me," Dary presses on.

Then again, he was already missing the feeling of those warm palms against his skin.

Not so reluctantly as he makes out, Rick nods and goes to hoist the tool back over his shoulder again. Daryl grabs his upper arm, though, firm enough to pinch if he were as delicate as a woman, and stops him right when he goes to lift. The anti-climactic slump tosses his centre of balance out and he has to right his step, but otherwise he's just glad the man has good timing or else he might've taken a plow to the face.

"You've done enough."

"I can do more."

"'s enough," it's firmer now, like a parent scolding a child. He never talks like that, not to the one man he answers to without question. "Do something else to distract yerself."

Rick feels the gardening hoe being torn from his tired fingers the second he stops holding it so viciously, and watches as Daryl tosses it to the side with a single extended arm. The muscles across Daryl's body, while not bulking and awkward, are prominent and impressive. He'd always known they were there, and while at times he'd felt vaguely envious, he'd mostly taken Daryl's raw physical strength for granted.

He doesn't throw the tool far, but Rick could honestly care less, eyes glued to the shape of his companion's bicep, trailing further up to the corded muscle rippling beneath his shoulder, the shape of his trapezius at the base of his neck where Rick was used to seeing a flat slope, such as in Lori's shoulders. All that strength from holding his crossbow cocked outward, from working outside in the sun and the trees, lugging back deer and other kills, carrying and lifting the heavy things, dragging bodies to be burned, carrying people...

Daryl had worked for his strength, paid for his body with sweat and blood.

Oddly enough, Rick found himself, for the first time in his life he could willingly remember, appreciating the superior masculine features of another man. He'd decided, after puzzling for some time over the unusual features of his friend's face, that Daryl was – _beneath the oil and sweat and mud and guts, of course_ – not only very handsome; and thanks to his ridiculously attractive build, sensual; but he could actually see the 'prettiness' that had been a part of Daryl's face in his younger years. Pretty wasn't a word Rick would use to describe Daryl now, not rugged and worn down from fighting for their lives, not faintly malnourished or unclean as they all were, not with the scruff he tried to keep shaved from his face and the hair growing in dark tendrils untamed over his brow and curling softly over the base of his neck, but sometimes...

Sometimes, when they scavenged new clothes that weren't stained black and maroon, and Carol forced them to scrub up before putting them on, Rick could see it. Daryl, though only barely younger than him, had yet to grow a grey hair or form a wrinkle that wasn't from frowning or scowling, and beneath the layers of grime, Daryl had surprisingly nice skin. When everyone was cleaned up on the rare occasion, the only ones without blemish seemed to be Beth, Carl, and Daryl.

Maggie had battled acne before the apocalypse, and without makeup the faint scars on the sides of her face were noticeable in a certain light. She had open pores that clogged with all the dirt from their treks, and though the survivalist in her meant she didn't mind getting her hands dirty, the feminine side came out when her skin was cleaned and red and black marks remained ingrained in her skin. Carol was older than Rick by only a few years, but she hadn't aged as well as some of the others. Her hair had been greying longer than he'd known her, and worry lines marred her face in places so deep they had to have been caused in concern for herself and her daughter while under her late husband's thumb. Glenn's skin oiled worse than the rest of them, and even when he'd cleaned up he was swiping at the sheen over his forehead in irritation.

Beth, amazingly enough, seemed untouched by the filth, despite being grotty and sweaty just like the rest of them. She'd tried to take care of herself even while they were all on the run, combing her hair every morning and night, washing her face with bore water unsafe for drinking so that she wouldn't cut into their supply, picking under her nails and changing her clothes as often as she was able. That she remained looking as clean as she did was an effort entirely her own.

Daryl, on the other hand, was probably the messiest, dirtiest, and most adverse to bathing of the lot of them, but somehow, under the layers of what Glenn had once dubbed Daryl's 'mud mask', his skin was perfectly toned and surprisingly pale, like fine china protected from the sun beneath a thin layer of dust. Rarely was Daryl not covered in the spray of walker blood or the remnants of squirrel guts, and though he had a thing just the same as Beth about having dirt beneath his nails, he couldn't care less how bad he reeked – not that they noticed, seeing as they all smelled just as bad as one another – or how dirty his skin and clothes were.

When he was clean, however, he managed to stay that way for a few days at least, as though he was happy to be so and didn't like the idea of ruining that. Once it started, though, it didn't stop until Carol shoved him toward the nearest body of water.

No matter how many times he'd seen it now, it always surprised him when Daryl came up to him smelling conspicuously like nothingness, skin freshly cleaned and hair shining and healthy, fierce eyes clear and thin lips naturally flushed rosy pink. It surprised him because beneath everything, beneath the mess and the hostility and the introverted personality, Daryl was a handsome, loyal, honest, caring man. Looking back on how they'd first met, he'd have never known him to be anything bar a pale reflection of his supremacist brother.

Rick wasn't even sure if it were the circumstances of the apocalypse or just the bond between Daryl and himself, but somehow, the one man who pulled a knife and he a gun, both on the very same day they met, was also the one person he cared most to keep alive and at his side. How they'd gone from scuffling in the dirt to this –

It was insane, tragic, and perfect. At least, in _his_ mind it was.

Rick sees Daryl's hand fall back to his side, sees the calculating eyes tracking him like he would the words in a book, sees the faint pursing of the other man's mouth like he was biting off his words the same way he did with everyone else, but all he takes in is just how wonderfully attracted he is to all these things he sees, everything he ever sees, fills in the rest of the gaps with thoughts of just how strong Daryl was.

Rick wants nothing more in that moment than to feel those heavy arms come around him. He wanted nothing more than to bring Daryl against his chest, embrace him as he had longed to do for some time, and to feel the warmth of the hold being returned. Perhaps, if he did it, and Daryl brought up his arms out of shock, regardless of how awkward or stiff or unfitting they might be together, he could pretend that perhaps Daryl had longed to hold him, as well.

He was so close to just stepping out and doing it, giving the other man no choice, but just as his weight shifted and his body began to lean forward, he snaps back, reeling two steps madly off the insane path he'd almost trodden.

_Don't let it get to your head._

_Do something else to distract yourself._

Even his own thoughts echoed with Daryl Dixon's Southern growl.

"I'll walk the fence," Rick tells Daryl, who wasn't blind to the way Rick had teetered forward only to waver back again. Unfortunately for Rick, seeing as he needed to clear his head before he did something stupid, Daryl was in mother-hen mode and came to his own conclusions.

"Oh no ya don't," he grinds out, the gleam of his eyes barely visible in his tight squint under the sunlight. "get yer ass back inside, 'fore ya get sunstroke."

It's not like Daryl had never told him what to do before, and it's not as though he was particularly gentle about it, neither, but for the first time, he can't help but look for a million things that weren't even there to be found. Trust, but only to an extent. Loyalty, but to what end? And the concern? That could be ruled down to anything, from kinship to a sense of responsibility for Rick's life.

But there was always the chance, right? There was always the chance that Daryl would be just as happy as Rick to rip their clothes off in some abandoned cell-block out of sight and away from their problems.

Away from _Rick's_ problems.

He must've been standing there too long, looking for things that were either too well guarded or simply non-existent, because Daryl's seemingly endless patience with him was starting to grind thin. A firm, calloused hand on his upper arm twists him in the right direction. _Inside._

"Go get some water, 'fore ya fall on your face an' I have ta pick yer stupid ass up," Daryl mutters at him, the hand that'd steered him now against the back of his shoulder to keep him moving. "Good Lord."

No matter how much is uncertain, at least he can count on Daryl's attitude, and if nothing else makes him smile by the end of the day, he'd be satisfied with this being the only thing that did.

.:.

* * *

**A/N:** I know it was a short note last week, but I just wanted to pump the chapter out so I wouldn't miss my deadline. I didn't have a chance to proofread it that afternoon but it was my own fault (I bought all the seasons of _Daria, _so I got sidetracked) and I completely forgot I was supposed to update until I got online.

I've had a few reviews saying I've captured Daryl really well, and I just want to say - thankyou so much! That's such a relief! I've never written Rick or Daryl before, so this is as much of a learning experience as anything.

I almost didn't get to update this chapter today - the internet in my area's been down since thursday and doesn't come back until this coming wednesday. I was just lucky I had this chapter uploaded, so I'm posting it from work. It also means I didn't get the chance to proofread it as thoroughly as I'd have liked, being at work and all.

I also just wanted to put out there about the 'angst' comment - I was more referring to the dramatic, turbulent path the 'romance' part of the story will take for a few chapters. I don't mean huge fights or tears or big emotional breakdowns (not counting Rick's farming compulsions).

**MK**


	5. Sapien V : Synapsids

**Sapien**

_Part V : Synapsids_

.:.

Daryl did end up having to re-bandage his thigh, but this time Rick made sure to keep his hands fisted in the thin mattress cover either side of him, and very purposely kept his eyes on the open cell door where Beth stood smiling and nursing baby Judith.

Afterwards, with both looking away so that he could pull and fasten his pants with some modesty, he kept his eyes on them as Daryl stood by, smiling down at the bundle in the young woman's arms. Beth, with her clear knowing eyes, gestured faintly with the babe, holding the newborn out toward Daryl's chest. Despite the way he looked between her and the child several times, he nods to her, wiping his hands consciously over the front of his shirt, taking baby Judith so carefully it was like he was trying to cup a butterfly in his hands.

Rick hadn't seen Daryl actually hold Judith before, though he knew he was the first one to feed her, pulling her from Carl's arms and claiming the right for himself – fitting, seeing as Daryl was the one who risked his life getting the formula in the first place, so no one would have rightfully denied him the chance to feed her himself. Mostly, whenever Daryl interacted with Judith, it was looking down at her over someone else's shoulder, or reaching out a hand across the table to play with her or fix her blanket.

He'd named her Little Asskicker, he'd saved her life without a moment's hesitation, he'd held her in his arms and according to the others, looked happier than they'd ever seen him. Rick regretted having missed the moment, but somehow he knew if he'd been present, Daryl would've handed the bottle to him instead, and the moment would've been lost anyhow.

Right now, Beth was doing the one thing Rick hadn't realised they'd failed to do – she was telling Daryl it was alright to hold the baby, even if she wasn't his own daughter.

What the others had described didn't begin to cover it – Daryl, the moment he decided to take Judith in his arms, flicked over like a light switch, going from stoic to paternal. Like clockwork, the moment the bundle was in his arms, an evolution took place, shelling him slowly to reveal the softer side beneath. Rick watched the pieces of his mask fall away in tiny glass shards, until all that was left of this hostile man was a father.

He looked like Judith belonged to him.

Rick was mid-fasten of his belt when Daryl started hushing her, fingers gently tracing the soft fuzz of hair atop her tiny head. Something in Rick, something which had always been apathetic to the sight of Judith in another's arms, gave way to a fiery warmth he hadn't felt before now, nothing at all like the hot surges of lust or rage. This was all new. This _hurt_.

Daryl had a self-satisfied grin creeping over his face, gently rocking Rick's daughter in his arms, when he turned from Beth's smiling eyes and to Rick himself. The look dimmed when he saw the man standing there, frozen doing his belt and staring right back.

For a moment, he looked awkward, the same way Rick had felt when he first held Judith and she began crying her eyes out. He looked like he might hand her back and Rick just couldn't let that happen. It was a beautiful moment, one that Daryl had for some reason been robbed of, and Rick wasn't going to let him run from what he wants anymore.

"You're a natural," Rick says, and if he clears his throat afterwards because his voice sounds too croaky, at least Daryl only glances at him from the corner of his eye. "She's going to adore you. You'll spoil her rotten."

There's a look on Daryl's face that Rick's seen oftentimes enough to recognise. It was the look he got when he didn't actually know how he was supposed to respond, if he was supposed to at all, but it wasn't worrying. Daryl was socially inept, and even after so long in one another's breathing space, sometimes they both still struggled to form the words that should've, by right, come perfectly naturally to them.

After a few more awkward rocks, Daryl softens again, carefully moving to sit down on the edge of Rick's bunk, leaning back at a slight angle so he could hold the infant with one arm. The other hand came back, fingers dancing before Judith's pudgy face, until the baby's hands both lifted without co-ordination to try and grab for them. Daryl was so busy playing and Rick so busy watching that they didn't notice Beth quietly slip away until Judith was already teething one of Daryl's captured fingers.

Clean, thankfully, because Daryl was responsible when dealing with wounds and Rick had watched him clean his hands himself.

Daryl and Rick both looked to the empty doorway, and then each other, and then back down at the baby, a small gesture of Daryl's head leading Rick to sit beside him, leaning in to see his baby daughter's face. Before he'd even realised they were sitting like this, Rick's chin was all but propped up on Daryl's shoulder, both watching as she chewed on Daryl's finger with pink, toothless gums. It was so comfortable like this together, and not just because of Judith's presence, either, Rick hopes.

Glenn is the one to find them both like that, Rick leaning against Daryl's shoulder and now also playing with his daughter while Daryl held her and watched on with a bright smile.

He starts off asking a question, about security or supplies or something or rather, but he takes one look at them both and, after a brief uncomprehending shock, smiles like he knows some kind of secret and tells them dinner will be ready in an hour – not what he'd come to tell them, but a good enough excuse to leave them be.

Daryl is the one who carries her out of the cell, and Daryl is the one who feeds her yet again, everyone watching on with grins and happy sighs. Judith is fed and asleep in Daryl's arms before he even touches food himself, and that's something Rick will never forget, the way Daryl carefully uses one hand and allows Carl to cut up his meat for him so that he doesn't have to pass her to anyone else, the way he keeps looking down at her sweet, calm face.

The way he meets Rick's eyes, this one time more significant than the other quick glances, how he stares and how he smiles so small and soft and yet, to Rick, it had to have been happier than the widest grin anyone had ever shone at him.

.:.

* * *

Rick isn't like some of the others in that he keeps track of the days, but he does take note of roughly how time passes. He falls short a day or a week here and there, the hours full of monotonous chores and the carefree bonding that'd been sorely missed these past few months, but he's generally accurate about how many days slip through their fingers. Sometimes he'll go into Beth's cell to stare at the calender with it's vibrant picturesque waterfall above, wondering how she'll keep track of the days after the coming December, but generally he doesn't register the names of the days anymore. There's Winter, and Summer, and that's all. Spring and Autumn had fallen as far from his memory as the names of the months.

He doesn't even know Judith's birthday. Hell, he can barely remember his own - he just knows that it came and went without any fanfare or even an inkling of that extra year added to his age.

According to his sketchy internal calender, it's been somewhere around two or three weeks since Daryl shot him through the leg with an arrow, stitched him up, then told him not to 'let it get to his head'. Two or three weeks of agonizing over his decision, the one that could possibly test their friendship to the absolute limit, and would end with them either no longer speaking, closer than ever, or completely misunderstood. Not that there was much to misunderstand, really.

Rick wanted Daryl, and while a large part of that was perhaps just frustration and tension, by now he knew it was purely for the other man and not just the desire for physical contact in general, which while at first was terrifying, wasn't worth having an identity crisis over. It's not like he was in love with the guy, he just lusted after him like he'd never felt before, and in a way it made him feel like a dog chasing its tail. Daryl was, in every sense, available, and nobody else was. For now that was good enough for him.

It was a good enough excuse to not have an identity crisis, at least.

They may never see another survivor as long as they live, and that was just a fact they'd all grown to accept. That he would remain abstinent was not something Rick found quite so easy to resign himself to. He didn't touch Lori the entire while he knew she was pregnant, and at the end he didn't even want to. By the end, he'd rather go on patrol or scavenging or a hunt with Daryl than be with her ever again. She was the mother of his children – not his wife.

When she died, he'd been devastated, and he couldn't completely understand why, but a part of him was still in love with her and would always be in love with the memory of how they'd been mostly happy in the old world. The part that couldn't forget or forgive, that couldn't overcome the thought whenever they tried to kiss that his best friend's cock had been behind those lips – it made him sick.

When he found out that the very day he returned that Shane had been inside her, fucking his wife into the dirt while he was trapped in a tank surrounded by the undead... no matter how hard he tried, or how often, he just couldn't forgive it. He'd understood, because it was just in human nature, and it'd be hypocritical of him considering Lori was barely in her grave and he was already thinking about somebody else, but he just knew that regardless of the fact he figured it out himself, Lori would never have confessed to him. If it hadn't been for the life growing inside her, and the complications that arose with it, she wouldn't have admitted her affair.

A part of him had wanted to get back at her, Rick recalls suddenly, the memory of it somehow sparked while watching Daryl hammering away at some pieces of timber, making god-knows-what across the quadrangle.

He and Lori had argued before he ran away on a hunt with Daryl, who had insisted on teaching them all enough to get by without him God forbid he died. She'd tried demanding he stopped running away from the group, tried telling him that hunting for food wasn't his job, and he'd demanded to know exactly when she assigned the task to Daryl. As far as he'd been concerned, Daryl didn't _have_ to keep them fed. It'd be a lot easier on his own weary body if he was looking out for himself rather than the rest of them as well. Sure, it would've left the redneck without any allies, but seeing as it was the man behind the crossbow that kept them alive all winter, Rick didn't think Lori's argument that Daryl had to do his part had a leg to stand on.

They'd been out a whole day and ended up camping the night in an abandoned car beside a ransacked cabin, because a vehicle with locks was more discreet and safe than a dwelling with a front door hanging off its hinges, but before they climbed in to go to sleep they fried up a squirrel each and sat around the indoors fireplace quietly, keeping a constant ear out for dangers. Despite the paranoia, he found he liked it - the silence, not having to constantly hear his companion's voice nagging or whining or talking at him. Daryl appreciated the things unspoken and mutually understood between them, one of those things being that idle conversation didn't precede safety.

Daryl also understood he was running away from Lori that night, which was why he never demanded they head back to camp, and instead suggested holing themselves up in the civic around the side that was covered in drapes of leaf litter. At least they could recline the seats that way, keep out of sight as well. Rick hadn't even considered sleeping in the abandoned car, stressing over the lack of security the cabin's broken windows and missing front door posed, knowing it was too late to make it back to the others before nightfall.

For just a moment after climbing into the car, both men staring up at the roof of it with their hands resting awkwardly across their stomachs, shivering but unwilling to say anything to distract themselves from the cold, Rick had looked across at Daryl in the failing light and wondered what it would be like to have the freedom to have sex with someone else. He'd only ever been with Lori, and the closest he'd gotten to touching another person had been Shane regaling him with stories during their adolescence. If he was going to sleep with someone, it'd have to be significant, because he'd never had it any other way.

It'd have to be with a person he could handle, not someone who grated furiously on his nerves or crawled under his skin and forced him to hate them.

Only problem was sleeping with a person like that was as good as breaking from Lori for them, and it wasn't exactly like he had a million options out there. Really, there was only Carol, but she'd just lost her husband and her daughter, and there was some kind of strange kinship between her and Daryl that he didn't want to encroach on.

Then he looked at Daryl again, and the idea came so fleetingly that he forgot the one biggest factor – Daryl was a man, and hence, just as uninterested as Rick should've been.

For near a half hour, Rick couldn't bring himself to sleep, not because of petty discomfort or nervous energy, but because he couldn't get the idea out of his head. He weighed up the option, debating whether it was worth approaching Daryl with the idea while far enough away that no-one would hear him scream if the redneck decided to scalp him instead.

Then he remembered exactly what it was he was considering, some sort of irrational halfhearted revenge on Lori for the mistakes she made and couldn't unmake. He decided he must've been losing his mind if he considered, no mater how far at length it may or may not have been, doing the nasty with Daryl in the back of some abandoned car in the middle of nowhere. Not that the redneck would've remotely agreed to something like that, but it was the thought that set the guilt in deep.

When Lori died, guilt was the most painful of emotions, knowing that the two of them were never going to have the chance to make up, ripping away his hopes with a cruel cold hand. He took their survival for granted, every day waking up thinking that this might be the day he finally brought himself to kiss his wife without thinking how it'd been on his best friend more times than he'd ever know. And every day, she'd look at him with those sweet brown eyes, and he'd remember that he killed Shane for her and she rejected him for it.

He never got past the feeling that she might've preferred if Shane survived than if he did, that she was only loyal to him because they were husband and wife and not because that was where her heart was. She fell in love with Shane, or at least she thought she did, and that feeling never quite went away.

But now, she wasn't here anymore, and he'd missed his chance to make things right.

Perhaps the only moral of this was that he couldn't wait for people to come to him, and he couldn't expect things to work themselves out, not in the time they didn't have. It was too late in the world for such a novelty as time. Especially when it slips away so unbidden.

Across the quadrangle, Daryl is still working.

The hunter takes the final nail out of his mouth and hammers it firmly into the wood, before standing what looked to be an impromptu set of shelves upright. Considering it was made from scrap wood, it was quite impressive – he'd never known Daryl had a hand for carpentry. The edges were squared, the shelves as evenly spaced as they were going to get without a measuring device, and it stood on its own.

He didn't have the time to be fickle, or the time to be afraid. At least if he got a punch to the face, he could move on from this inconvenient obsession with Daryl's body and what he could do to it.

Daryl's pressing down weight on the top of the shelves. They only come midway up his chest, so he's using his hands with his elbows cocked out. The timber creaks but it doesn't wobble, not even an inch.

Rick's telltale gait must've given him away because Daryl knows it's him without even turning around. It might've also been the avid staring for the past ten minutes, but Rick likes to think Daryl knows him well enough to track his location at any point in the prison.

"Wish ah had a belt-sander and a router – could'a smoothed up these edges, made 'em safer."

"What's it for?" Rick asks, not really expecting a definite answer. Daryl surprises him.

"Little Asskicker," he answers dismissively, like he wasn't just busted building furniture for Rick's daughter for no reason, "nothin' fancy. Don' have the tools for that. Hell, these nails aint gonna hold it together more than a few years tops, her bein' a toddler an' all. But it's somethin', at least."

It is. It's better than what Rick could've built with all the tools Daryl could possibly name. He was never good in woodwork, and they were only simple projects like clocks and television remote holders and money boxes. These shelves were plain cut, but up close Rick could see it was even and impossibly straight. It was made from three clashing colours of timber, two stained different shades with one lacquered thick enough to reflect like glass, while the plywood at the back was still plain and fresh as though from a hardware store, dark knots in the timber forming an inconsistent swirl, like oil on water.

"What would you have used?" he asks, because Daryl was obviously into this sort of thing, and he felt kind of bad for not knowing sooner.

"Hardwood. Stained it up nice. Would'a used a biscuit joiner, too, probably," he says. It must be obvious from Rick's face that he had no idea what that was. Daryl laughs. "It scoops out this small gap in the wood, an' ya glue it to another piece with a biscuit... 's a thin, oval-shaped piece of timber," he says, gesturing with his fingers parted about two inches.

"And that's stronger than nails?"

"Proper glue is, at least, if ya clamp it together. Don't give ya tetanus, neither."

"You lost me at belt-sander," Rick admits, laughing at himself. "I think the best thing I did in woodwork was drop the class."

Daryl smirks, and the look isn't even modestly smug as usual. This guy's pretty damn proud of himself right now. "Had an apprenticeship as a cabinet maker when I was a kid," Daryl says, "had a knack for building shit. Made a lot of mah own stuff after that. Chairs 'n desks an' this kickass wall unit that lasted ten years 'till Merle got drunk an' broke it with his head."

"Was that your job? You know, before all this?" Rick asks, a wave of his hand around the prison. Daryl actually glances around, but he's pretty sure it's to avoid his eyes, not to take in the wonderful scenic vision.

"Nah, I ne'er finished the apprenticeship," he says quietly, thin lips quirking to the side like he had something else to add. Maybe an explanation, Rick thinks, but he doesn't seem to be in an overly sharing mood today, because he doesn't elaborate on how he lost the job or what his occupation was. He's just kind of swaying the hammer between his thumb and forefinger, staring at it.

"I always took you for a mechanic," Rick says honestly into the heavy lull.

Daryl scoffs, flipping the hammer back up into a proper grip. "Really?"

"What? It was that or a gun-store clerk."

"Merle was tha mechanic, 'fore he went all military. He never went back to it - just kinda did stuff for the neighbours outta our garage, back on tha property. Learned everythin' ah know 'bout it from him. Here, see?" Daryl says, holding out the hand that wasn't still gripping the hammer, palm down. Rick blinks at the other man's hand, not sure what he's supposed to be looking at. "Hardly any scars. Me brother, he always had a black nail or two, an' burns on his knuckles. Most'a that was probably from workin' drunk, fucken' dumbass."

"So...what _did_ you do?"

"Tax accounting," Daryl says bluntly. It takes Rick a moment to register the sarcasm, but he already had a vision of Daryl in a suit and it was kinda not such a bad thought. He smiles anyway, because Daryl's giving him this look like he didn't get that it was a joke.

"You're a real hands-on guy," Rick comments, and not without reason. Daryl was handy and not just because he could shoot a buck from further away than Rick could even see one. He was good with the cars and the bike and apparently he knew how to weld. Plumbing and electrical problems were his forte in the old world, as Rick had found out. A problem with the aerial and Daryl was the one on the roof, or the hot water stops working and Daryl's the one who fixes the gas heater. The most Rick had gotten from the conversation at the time was that Merle was a useless piece of shit.

Now, he realised Daryl was just the kind of man who liked to be self-sufficient. He didn't like relying on plumbers or mechanics or electricians. The only person he let himself rely on was his brother, and the most Merle could do was tell Daryl what to say and when.

In a way, Rick had become that for Daryl. He'd replaced the somewhat controlling brother that'd always been in the other man's life, and though he wasn't sure he was okay with that, he also very much was, because in the end that made him the most significant person in Daryl's life. That kind of dependency wasn't natural in a grown man, but nothing about this world was natural anymore, and if that was what kept them alive – Rick leading and Daryl following – then that was how it was going to be.

"Hey, Daryl, you-" he stops himself, hating the words that almost came out of his mouth. _You ever think about us_, he'd almost said, and if that wasn't the most stupid thing he'd have ever nearly uttered in his life he didn't know what was. _There's no 'us'._

"What?" he asks, and Rick shakes his head before he gives himself the chance to answer truthfully.

"Nothin'."

"What, Rick."

And hell, if that tone doesn't make him want to scamper off and hide until every one of these last ghastly urges fades to black...

"It looks good," Rick tries. "If ya wanna get some supplies next run out near that hardware store, it's no problem. I better get back to Carol about those-"

"What were you gonna say," Daryl cuts in, and it's so unlike Daryl that Rick is caught off guard. The man he knows wouldn't have pried. He would've left it alone, accepted it was something not worth mentioning, and not for the first time, Rick was truly surprised by how routine things had become with this man that they could surprise him like this.

Maybe it was unlike Daryl to keep asking, and maybe he was aware he was asking a question he didn't want to know the answer to, and maybe it was stupid of Rick to give in. They were all the open-ended things that Rick was questioning, but none of them stopped the words from slipping out.

"Aint you lonely?"

It was out of line and he knew it. Daryl certainly didn't disagree, what with the way his knuckles turned white as he gripped the hammer in his hand, like he would sooner throw it across the yard than place it down safely. He gives Rick an answer, even though he looked like he'd rather be chewing chalk.

"Prefer goin' it alone," he almost seems to spit out, like the sooner he said the words the sooner the conversation would be over.

"For everything?" Rick asks before he can help it. He knows he isn't being subtle, and he knows Daryl picks up on the innuendo because he goes faintly red by his collar, but he doesn't really want to take it back. Especially not when Daryl meets his eyes firmly on reply.

"Aint ever had it any other way."

Whatever it's supposed to mean, it's the farthest thing from an open invitation and he knows it. Logically, Daryl and Carol should be sharing a bunk by now - provided they were as attracted to one another as the others seemed to think - but something was holding them back and though Rick knew it couldn't be for lack of physical experience, maybe it was deeper than that. Maybe, emotionally, Daryl didn't know how to connect with people because he'd never really done it before.

Buried up in the woods all alone with his jackass brother and a violent past well worth suppressing, Rick couldn't find an ounce of blame in himself for the kind of man Daryl became. It's a miracle there was even a good man to find under all the hissing and spitting the near feral redneck had done back in Atlanta.

"Maybe it's time to try."

Daryl's looking right at him when Rick sees the change, so this time, unlike last, he catches every little bit of it. There's a brief moment of widening to his eyes, then his thin lips purse and his gaze flickers down, shy and unengaging.

"Didn't Carol want ya fer somethin'?" he asks. No matter how much Rick wanted to hang onto the fading tethers of their conversation, there was nothing more for it than to just move on and accept that Daryl knew exactly what he was saying and just wasn't interested. This was the biggest 'back-off' hint Daryl could've given him without making a scene of it.

It was all like one of those terribly sappy romance movies that used to make Lori cry at the end.

As Rick walks away and Daryl watches him, not going back to work until he's certain the other man is out of sight, he wonders to himself if this one would make everyone cry, too. He hopes it doesn't.

.:.

* * *

It was sometime in the two days after Daryl's dismissal that Rick accepts that he still has no idea what to do with himself. He doesn't want to back off, and realistically he hasn't even really attempted seducing Daryl yet. He was only testing the waters and he was already scared of the chill, but he hadn't even put a whole foot in yet.

It was dry on this side, and he had no idea what kind of things were lurking beneath the surface of Daryl's ever-calm exterior.

Torn between taking the plunge and letting them both adjust to the drop in temperature, or sticking with what they both know and walking away from the edge, Rick feels his head starting to spin.

Maybe it was his stubbornness, or that he was at least partially convinced that Daryl might only be scared of cutting loose on someone without fists, but every time he told himself he should just get over what he wants, something has the thought crawling right back up.

This time, it was entirely Daryl's fault.

Just like always when things got a little too close for comfort, Daryl had perfectly mastered the art of denial, and pretended nothing had happened. In reality, nothing actually did happen, but to Rick, it felt like they'd had a thousand conversations all pointing in the same direction and without any sign of veering away. How Daryl could sit right there next to him, shoulder-to-shoulder like always, and hold a conversation with Glenn over eating with his fingers, acting for all the world like the tension only existed when they were alone together, Rick would never understand.

"Ya aint mah mother," the hunter sneers at Glenn, "and 'sides, there aint enough cutlery ta go 'round."

"You've always done it, though," the younger man points out, "why?"

"Just got used ta using mah fingers, is all," Daryl dismisses, sticking the middle one up when Glenn snorts with innuendo.

He shifts in his seat, and his entire side is pressed right against Rick now. It wasn't unusual for the two of them to sardine even with plenty of seats around, but today the reason was simply that the table was crowded, and Beth had a habit of sticking her bony elbow into your side by accident. She was on the other side of Daryl, and with plenty of elbow room. Unfortunately – or fortunately; Rick couldn't tell yet – that meant he and Daryl were actually pressed closer than usual. Understandable – no one likes bruised ribs.

No one likes having the focus of their desire pressed against them and not being able to do anything about it, either. Rick was having a hard time remembering he was supposed to be eating his food and not staring at it.

"Damn, girl," Daryl suddenly bellows out in the way that was so typical of him, "why don'cha point those things at the walkers an' make 'em useful."

Beth pulls her arms between her legs with a giggle. "Sorry," she mumbles, all smiles and flickering eyes, a perfect picture of seventeen-year-old innocence, before she moves back to her food. Daryl tries ducking out of the way of her elbow again, and Rick is on the edge of the seat as it is, so it's getting ridiculous how close they are now.

Daryl's warm against his side, but he's pushing closer and Rick doesn't think he's ever touched this much of the man all at once ever, at least not for this long, and not including the times they'd had to carry or drag one another out of harms way. They'd all 'showered' the night before, so the hunter didn't smell like sweat or rot or oil or metal. There was a faint scent of sawdust to him, though, still wearing the over-shirt he'd had tied around his waist two days ago while building the shelves for Judith's things.

Daryl looked over at him from behind the shadows of his tired eyes, the faintest of warm smiles being cast in his direction, and the heat that'd steadily begun to build in his crotch throbs, flustered.

Rick's lost his appetite for food.

Daryl's gnawing on a bone of one of the two undergrown pheasants he'd been lucky enough to shoot yesterday, so he's paying no attention to Rick, and therefore his ear was in the perfect position to lean in and speak against.

Daryl shudders faintly from the feeling of hot breath against his ear, and Rick feels the shiver travel through him like water.

"You move any closer, you're gonna be on my lap, and you wont like what you find there."

Rick doesn't think the words through – they come out as he thinks them, and really he could've put it much more eloquently than that. He could've just asked for space, really. That's what any normal man would've done. Maybe a shoulder or a palm used for extra emphasis.

Then again, a normal man with those words spoken to them would've edged back over, risk of sharp elbows or not, but Daryl turns to eye him in that same ambiguous way he does sometimes, gaze flickering from feature to feature in search of a lie. His hair's grown long enough to cross over his brow, the tips of the choppy wisps just now starting to fall into his eyes, and right now he's looking up through it like a beast peering through the bars of a cage.

_Pretty accurate analogy_, Rick thinks.

That Daryl doesn't react, though he'd clearly heard the words seeing as they were spoken into his ear, is infuriating and relieving, and both for completely the wrong reasons. He doesn't move any closer or any farther away, though he does glance from the corner of his eye a few times after diverting the conversation to something a little less sexual than the fact Daryl has an oral fixation with his hands.

And shit, now Rick's wondering what other things he'd have an oral fixation with. _God dammit. _

He isn't going to eat anything else. It's unhealthy how much food he leaves on his plate on a regular night, though it always gets eaten by someone – usually Daryl or Oscar or Carl – but tonight the canned asparagus and corn kernels and a skinny poultry leg just looks plain dismal.

He pushes the plate to the middle the same way he always does, and Glenn swipes the meat before Rick's even pulled his hand away – it was one of the small understandings they'd all come to during the winter, though there wasn't much of it happening except when someone was feeling sick or had looked at Lori's swelling stomach and anemic face before eating. When the plate's in the middle, it's Open Season. They don't even have to ask questions anymore. Axel's still a little reserved about picking at people's leftovers, and the girls rarely did it unless the plate was purposely pushed in their direction, but the others usually had no qualms with taking whatever they could get their forks into.

Even Daryl was pretty well known for doing it, even if it usually was with his hands, but today something's different. Rick moves to stand the moment the plate's no longer his responsibility, but Daryl's hand is quicker than Rick's legs. Those long, powerful fingers are wrapped around his wrist before he's even completely committed to his escape, and he can feel the faint dampness of saliva and salty asparagus juice on his skin.

It does nothing to help the predicament he'd been trying to ignore.

"You alright?"

"Fine," he insists, tugging his hand back conspicuously to try and break the hold. Daryl doesn't take the hint. "Not in the mood for any more corn."

"Ah man," Oscar breaks in, "I hear ya. I think the biggest stock in that damn cafeteria was canned bloody corn."

The conversation's directed at everyone, though, and no one's really waiting for Rick or Daryl's input before they start carrying on about the foods they're all sick of eating over and over. Corn was right up there, though, along with beans, canned stews, and squirrel.

"Slim pickins'," Daryl says to Rick, and maybe he's a bit offended that he didn't eat the meat, but it's hard to focus on that with the hand still around his wrist. "Ah'd take ya to a bistro, but there aint any 'round here no more."

"We'll just have a stay-at-home date, then," Rick retorts before he thinks it through, and Glenn and Maggie overhear and start to chuckle. Daryl's hand tightens, then lets go.

"Fine, have it yer way, but don' complain when yer all skin an' bones an' no one wants ta look at ya in case they start countin' ribs out loud."

Rick decides there's really no answer to that. Instead, he just slaps Daryl on the shoulder and squeezes just once, trying to apologise for not eating the pheasant in the same ravaging way everyone else did, and turns to leave. He doesn't miss the feeling of Daryl's hand returning the gesture best he can with a tap beside his ribs, and though it could've just as well been testing his theory on Rick's protruding skeleton, he's pretty sure it was just the same easy affection they'd found themselves developing over the months.

You learn to love a guy who saves your life more than a dozen times, after all.

And perhaps to the outside, it would've just looked like the unlikely brotherly bond he and Daryl shared, but to Rick, it was more than that.

More, because he'd outright suggested to Daryl that he was getting turned on, and the other man barely reacted beyond a few straying glances searching for whether to take it as playful banter or complete seriousness.

For the first time, even when one of them was walking away, it didn't feel like a dozen new questions had come out of nowhere. Just the same old ones, running around and around in pointless circles.

He didn't have the time to pussyfoot around testing the waters. Either he was in or he was out, and Daryl just wasn't giving him enough to help him decide. He was right back at the start, deciding to do what he has to do to get his answer.

A kick in the teeth would definitely answer more of those questions than this tension between them.

.:.

* * *

**A/N: **So at least my internet is back in proper working order, and now I can keep track of which reviews I've replied to, ha! Speaking of - I love everyone. I wouldn't be writing this story if it wasn't for the response of the readers that've encouraged me to get to the point I'm at, and I know I'll only keep improving with practice and support. If I ever succeed as an author, I can honestly say that my success is largely owed to all the people who've read my stories online and given me such amazing feedback. I just want to thank everyone who takes the time to review (even the guests who just drop a line or two), and who took the time to follow and favourite the story, and even just the people who've given it a chance and read it at all. Thankyou!

I've had a few people ask about the leather pouch from chapter 2 and what was in it - I haven't forgotten about it. It's in the story, much much later. I'm trying to not have any loose ends. I can't actually tell you more than that, because it's not important right now, but it is later. However, if you ever do have any questions, feel free to ask them - I'll answer them as best I can without spoiling anything, and sometimes people point small plot-holes out to me that I really appreciate.

This is a _LONG_ story, and despite having some 'moments' the actual Rickyl wont come for a short while yet. I've finally planned the ending, but it's a cliffhanger and I don't want to write it and piss everyone off, but at the same time it would really work well with the story. I don't know. I follow a set plan in my stories, and about half-way through the characters just start writing themselves and hijack the plot. Lets see how long it takes for my fic to get jacked by Rick and Daryl, shall we?

Hope you enjoyed the update! See you all next Monday!

**Love, MK**


	6. Sapien VI : Therapsida

**Sapien**

_Part VI : Therapsida_

.:.

"Why me," Daryl asks a few evenings later, a troubled look on his features that was so commonly there Rick almost misses it for the moment, lit only by the half-dozen candles carefully placed about Rick's cell. "I aint got nothin' you want."

"If you mean breasts, than I can assure you, I'm aware of your gender."

"You also aware I aint queer," he says, his voice that same deep growl it always became when he was trying to puzzle something out and was getting frustrated, the _'Atlanta Temper'_ as Rick often thought of it resurfacing in those rare moments. Daryl had become a calm person, though he was still fascinatingly hair-trigger when it came to walkers and outsiders. Defensive mode, mostly, but he didn't like things that didn't go his way, which was part of what made the fact he was a willful follower quite unusual. Daryl chooses to follow – he had all the capabilities of a leader, but he resented those kinds of responsibilities, preferring to let others take control.

Rick isn't disillusioned into believing Daryl was scared of him or any lone man with a gun. When he isn't happy with something, it's easy to tell, and even when he followed an order he didn't quite agree with it was plain as day that he didn't like it. The clearest sign was that he slowly but surely got mad about it.

It'd all been building up to this moment anyway, but Rick's surprised by his own sense of calm. He's not feeling the urge to cover his tracks or to run away, and Daryl isn't a man who appreciated being coddled and shielded from the truth. If he's here, it's because he wants answers – honest ones.

He owed him that.

Rick was unlacing his boots, sitting on the edge of his bunk and listening to the distant melody Beth was singing to baby Judith at the other end of the block. The walls were iron and stone, and a lot of things tended to resonate. It took at least two weeks for anyone - that anyone being Daryl - to tell Glenn and Maggie that they should keep their sex restricted to the watch tower or in other more secluded parts of the prison, if only for Carl and Beth and Hershel's sakes. Rick didn't particularly care, unless he was still awake to actually hear them of course, though sometimes he'd wonder how they'd react if they were no longer the only ones making a racket.

They still had sex in the cell block, late at night when Carl and Beth and Judith were all definitely asleep, and most likely Hershel too, though he'd moved his things to the furthest cell from them some time in the first week he was up on his crutches.

For a moment, staring at Daryl in his open cell door, he wonders how people will react if they heard the two of them going at it, if they'd picture the violent ripping off of clothes and the biting and scratching that Rick sometimes did.

Surely sex with Daryl Dixon wouldn't be anything less than aggressively passionate, right?

Sex with Lori was amazing in the way it always was at first, but he struggled to please her as easily as she pleased him – female anatomy was complicated and left him bemused even to this day, a father of two kids and a widower. He sometimes thought that maybe he left Lori unsatisfied more than she let on.

He doesn't think he'd have that problem with another man. He also doesn't think sex with another man would be as monotonous as it'd become toward the end with his wife. Lori didn't like experimenting, she didn't like anything particularly risque, even moderate things like having sex in the kitchen or the living room while Carl was home, regardless of whether he was in bed or not. She certainly didn't like the idea of running out into the forest like teenagers.

_Apparently it turned her on with Shane._

He doesn't want to think about that. What he wants to think about is Daryl over him, under him, pinning him against a wall, grinding into him, touching him everywhere. He can't think about that, either, because said object of his thoughts is still standing right in front of him and requiring answers Rick wont be able to process if he starts feeling his blood run south.

"You aint a queer, Rick," Daryl says, like it's something he's completely sure of, even if he doesn't look it.

"No, I'm not," Rick confirms, and Daryl's expression tightens but he can't tell exactly what changed, "but this aint about that."

"Then what the fuck's it about, 'cause yer drivin' me crazy!"

Rick was pretty sure Daryl wasn't talking the good kind of crazy. He honestly hadn't thought he was being such a nuisance, or that his suggestiveness was getting to be too much for this man. After all, Daryl wasn't exactly sitting him down and telling him he could back down the easy way or the hard way.

Unless that's what this is right now. If it is, Rick's not quite sure he can explain the sudden sickness that's curdling low in his stomach like nausea.

"Look, I aint gonna be making any excuses. You aint stupid, Dare, you know what I want."

"_Why_."

Fuck, there's no way out now. He tries to shrug, like it's no big deal, like he doesn't feel strangely balanced between mania and depression depending on whatever response Daryl has for him. "I want you. Have for a while."

"How long's a while," Daryl asks him, tone dark and firm and Rick isn't sure what it means. He doesn't sound flattered, in fact he sounds downright disappointed in Rick, like he'd done something stupid or wrong and needs to be chastised for it.

"Honestly, first time I considered it?" he asks, waiting for the smallest of go-ahead nods from Daryl to answer him, "bout two months after the farm. Was running from Lori 'cause we were arguing again. You took me on a hunt, and I was still angry enough from the fight to consider getting even."

Daryl's nose scrunches and his upper lip picks up in a skeptical twist. It wasn't outright disgust, because Rick's seen that look on Daryl's face enough times to know it, and it wasn't anger either, because that too was pretty easy to separate from Daryl's other emotions. This was more like a look of internal debate, picking things apart, re-arranging them, and shuffling them back into a pattern that made sense.

"An' ya didn't say anythin' that night 'cause..."

"Because I was being selfish and hypocritical, and I would've been projecting my anger at my wife onto you," he says, feeling heavier and heavier with each word. He tries to lighten the air between them, hoping to erase the hard line creasing Daryl's brow. "I also weighed up the probability of you burying the body and telling everyone a walker did it."

"Ya think I'm like that?" Daryl snaps, and Rick reels back, unintentionally smacking the back of his head on the iron frame of the top bunk. Daryl shifts, like he wants to go to Rick's side, but he freezes in place with a faint scuff of a rubber sole and doesn't move another inch. "Thought ya knew me better 'n that, Rick."

Rick's rubbing the back of his head with a hand. "Thought I did, too, but you gotta see where I'm coming from. It's not like you'd have agreed and I knew that."

"You didn't know that."

"Why, would you have?"

Daryl's jaw is grinding, a fluttering behind his temple that makes Rick feel the heat rise beneath his collar in a fleeting rush of blood for no reason. Embarrassment, he assumes, because this was Daryl trying to let him down easy, and Rick's not making it any easier on him to do that. This was the best friend he'd never have had if it weren't for the end of the old world, this was the man who could watch his back better than Shane ever did as his friend or his partner. This, right here, was his best friend, a man he loved dearly and just so happened to desire, as well.

He doesn't have the best track record with best friends, by the looks of it. One takes a knife in the guts, and the other looks like he'd just discovered one that'd been sitting in his back for months without his knowledge.

"I get it," Rick says quietly, "I aint trying to make you feel guilty. I don't want you looking at me like that, the way you are right now."

Beneath the frustration and the anger and the confusion, it all boiled down to one thing. Daryl rarely ever apologised, and when he did it was usually pretty significant, and was usually preceded by a lot of swearing and emotions that didn't exactly run parallel with remorse. That was just Daryl, though - he didn't know how to express guilt any more than he knew how to express love or gratitude. It wasn't that he never felt it, he just didn't know what to do with it. Not at first at least, because he eventually found a way if he cared to.

Daryl was a very kind man, and if given enough time to process things, he always tried to right his wrongs, things like lashing out at the wrong person or ignoring the group. Feeling as much as Daryl feels but not immediately knowing how to filter and express...it'd make anyone angry.

"I don't want you to be sorry about this," Rick practically whispers. It was sinking into his bones just how real this moment was. Even his unshakable calm couldn't mask the clenching feeling inside, the way his stomach was turning over and over, but regardless of himself and what felt like an impending meltdown, his mind was honed on the look on Daryl's face. And despite his words, his injured pride hoped this would affect the other man too.

Daryl's eyes narrow in a glare. "How tha hell would you know what I'm feelin'."

"I might not be your keeper, but just because I don't know how you'll react to my...to the fact I want you, it doesn't mean I don't know you. I've lived with you long enough now to know that you're the kind of man who can't just come out and say what he's really thinking." Daryl's glare has eased off, but it isn't gone yet. The longer it stays there, the more Rick feels like he's naked under a microscope. "So...I don't want you to be sorry."

_Even if I really do, because I'm selfish and I want you more than I ever wanted anybody else in my entire life, and I don't know why._

Daryl's mouth purses in a way that Rick's never seen before on anyone but Lori, formed by pale lips that would never part for the truth. There is still a hard shape to his snake-like eyes, and his teeth were still grinding just faintly though it's more out of habit than emotion. He hasn't softened in the slightest. Nothing he could possibly say would faze this man.

"Whatever," Daryl mutters finally, crossing his arms tight, flexed from the shoulder to the wrist with tension.

"Are you mad at me? For any of this?"

"Yeah," Daryl admits. It winds him, like a punch in the diaphragm. "Ah wish you didn't put me in this position, havin' ta ask ya 'bout it. It's yer business, but I didn't know which way was left anymore."

"I'll get over it," Rick insists, seeing the way Daryl grows awkward even behind the frustrated glare. "All I needed was to hear you say 'no'."

It seems Daryl's run out of energy to hold eye-contact let alone a conversation, because no sooner do the words leave Rick's mouth than he's shutting down, eyeing the half-unlaced boots on the other man's feet like they were something important. His teeth are grinding again, so furiously Rick's surprised he can't hear it from the bunk.

"'m takin' watch tonight," Daryl says out of nowhere, and it's a bit of a surprise because it was supposed to be Oscar's turn - Rick knows this because his own turn was tomorrow night. Daryl's place on the roster wasn't for another two days. He still looks impassive, and he still wont look away from the laces of Rick's boots, but his voice isn't quite cold enough to match his expression and Rick has a feeling it's supposed to mean something. He just has no idea what.

"Okay..." Rick replies, because the words were just hanging there, prompting him for some kind of response, but he doesn't know what Daryl wants from him, and isn't that the irony? He's the one who's been fantasising about bending the other man over, and he's wondering what _Daryl_ wants from _him_?

Daryl's expression shifts again, and Rick compares his words to a screwdriver, twisting further than the thread, splitting the fibres of the wood too deep to see at first. He half expects Daryl to growl out some kind of insult or to throw something, but instead all he gets is that same tight expression.

"Get some rest," Daryl dismisses, apparently a perfectly acceptable replacement for 'goodnight' or 'we'll talk later', and vanishes out the cell door. He takes with him the comfort Rick felt within his private space, sucking out all the light and the warmth like a screaming void, swallowing reality whole. It was all so open-ended and unsettled, and really nothing had been answered whatsoever.

Because Daryl never actually said 'no', and despite what had clearly happened just now, Rick foolishly thinks that must mean something.

.:.

* * *

The next morning, after what had to have been the most restless and utterly sleepless night he'd had in weeks – plagued with such an intense feeling that he'd forgotten something important, he could hardly keep his eyes closed longer than a half hour. He ended up tossing and turning until there was nothing left for him to do but stand up and pace, first around his impossibly tiny cell then later along the monotony of the catwalk – Rick went into the mess hall with a tired slump and bruised eyes that rejected any direct rays of light from the highlight windows. Daryl was already there, relieved from watch by an early riser no doubt, leaning beside the pot of vegetable-stock broth they'd scraped together yesterday. He has a white bowl in hand and a teaspoon bringing the cool soup to his lips when Rick spots him.

That's really all it was. There was some cabbage and carrot that Maggie and Glenn had recently harvested from a farm or greenhouse that was no doubt farther away than they said it was, but it was mostly just stock cubes dissolved in water. It could've done with celery and onion and potatoes, all things they were planning on remedying if their garden was successful, but for now it was all they had, and providing they could be bothered to heat it first it was also hot. It wasn't much, but it was a pretty drastic change from opening a can, no matter how little nutrients could be found in what was essentially just flavoured water.

Daryl noticed Rick the second the other man entered the small hall, and his reaction to the arrival was somewhat unexpected.

Until now, Daryl had acted completely oblivious whenever something happened that might've given away Rick's less-than-christian intentions. The strength of his denial would be impressive if it hadn't been so damn frustrating, never mind that Rick had only really acted in ways that could be brushed off if necessary. The only reason Daryl even knew was because he was the kind of man who notices everything, and being as close as they were, Rick couldn't expect him not to pick up on the nuances that were completely out of character for their relationship.

For a long time Rick had only thought of them as allies, at least until some time during the winter when it was quite clear to them both they were at least somewhat friends, and then they realised they were actually pretty damn good friends, and now... No matter how drastically his perspective of Daryl changed, their emotional connection had remained on a primitive, uncomplicated level, with Daryl's loyalty and Rick's stability all that needed to be said on the subject. Until these past few weeks, of course, when everything started getting messy and dangerous.

While they were never the type for long, waxing discussions about their feelings, their physical contact matured from a simple handshake in greeting to something more unique. They'd never embraced, never really touched each other overly much in the sense of roughhousing the way Rick was used to doing with Shane, but they developed their own routine, their own ways of intruding on one another's personal space, until it all became habit.

It was as good of an _"I'm here for you"_ as Rick ever expected to get from the other man, the way they begun sitting right beside one another wherever possible, the way small touches to the shoulder or the back of the neck or the arm punctuated and dismissed and emphasized in a way only they found necessary.

If the circumstances of Daryl's upbringing were different, more nurturing perhaps, Rick could see him having been a physical expresser. He'd have been the kind of man who hugged his friends, who always had an arm over their shoulders or leaned close to talk. As it was, Daryl could hardly stand to be touched by people he trusted with his life, and he damn near jumps out of his skin whenever _Carol_ attempts to hug him. It wasn't to say he didn't want to touch people.

Sometimes, Rick saw Daryl reach for the others, then tuck his hand back into his side. He'd see Daryl move as though he was going to rough Carl's hair up, or straighten Carol's jacket, or hold out his arm to bring Beth to his side in the cold. He'd see Daryl's free hand fly up to steady Hershel when the old man got clumsy on his crutches, and during the winter he would do it when they'd been walking or scouting too long and it looked like someone needed to sit down. He saw the barrier tentatively broken with reassuring pats to Lori's shoulder during the winter, or somewhat playful shoves in the back to Glenn, and once he even saw T-Dog hold out his hand for a high-five after a pretty awesome shot and Daryl didn't even hesitate for a second.

No matter how comfortable he grew with Carol, or how easily he began to speak his mind, he never progressed to quite the same level as he did with Rick. Around Rick, he actually let himself reach out, he actually let them sit pressed from shoulder to knee, and maybe it was because they were safest when together, maybe it was because he felt there was some kind of responsibility to the man whose life he'd saved a dozen times over, but whatever it was, they were at a point that Rick could comfortably say Daryl wanted contact no matter the lengths he went to avoid it.

He thought he knew Daryl better than the others.

He's starting to realise he doesn't know Daryl at all.

"Morning," he grumbles, and it was meant to sound chipper enough but it ends up sounding irritable and damn it, he didn't even sleep an hour last night.

Daryl's eyes scan him up and down, swallowing the spoonful of broth with a funny twist in his lips like it doesn't taste all that great – _huh, Daryl has a sense of taste afterall_ – but there is no reaction other than the cursory glance. He turns his hidden eyes back down to his soup like it has escape routes written in the limp strip of cabbage leaf wrapped around the spoon, kicks his crossed ankles apart, and pushes off the wall.

He doesn't even nod to Rick or nothing. He does give the other man one more look, but almost immediately his gaze is downcast to the ground and he's walking out of the dining hall with his breakfast – or maybe it's his dinner, because he'll be sleeping at least four hours once he makes it to his cell – and without a word, disappearing like he hadn't even seen Rick come in. Like he was never there in the first place. A ghost.

Rick was expecting some kind of acknowledgement, at least, even if they didn't sit down at the table uncomfortably squashed together and joke aimlessly about finger-food and how terrible Rick really is at poker. Daryl was the one who came asking questions despite knowing what the answer would be, but all Rick could think was that he'd somehow crossed a line last night by admitting he wanted his friend in an unconventionally friendly way.

There had been no anger in Daryl's eyes, however briefly they'd met just now. Actually, there wasn't much of anything in Daryl's eyes, just plain nonchalance, like he was well beyond denial and all the way back at Altanta, stuck between learning his own personality and being surrounded by strangers. Like he just didn't care anymore.

He's not even hungry. He's tired as hell, would rather curl up in his bunk only he knows he'll stay awake stewing over Daryl ignoring him, but he has to stay awake and he has to keep on his feet. He forces himself to finish half a bowl of cold broth, feeling substantially more awake now that he'd eaten something, and starts work on the next garden bed early.

If the soil only took half as long to turn over in his frustration, the others wouldn't know the difference, all aside from Axel who stood guard in the watch tower and saw the way Rick hacked at the ground like it'd wronged him and his family.

For near an hour he tore away at it until the grass and weeds were cleared and a wide patch of new soil for whatever seeds they planned on sewing next stretched lengthways several feet away from the three he'd already planted. Raw hands with blisters forming at the bases of his fingers reminded him he hadn't used his gloves, and that his palms weren't so calloused that they wouldn't bleed if he wasn't careful, but he'd been so caught up he hadn't even thought of them.

He'd spent the whole time fretting over how long Daryl was going to ignore him, and contemplating the results of seeking him out to apologise or just leaving him be. As he wrapped his weaker hand in the soiled blue bandanna shoved in his back pocket, tying it with shaking fingers and his teeth, he wonders whether or not Daryl will be furious with him again for being careless. He wonders if Daryl will bother to say anything.

This was why he didn't talk all that much. People don't really want to know what he has to say, no matter how they insist they do.

.:.

* * *

That evening, with Judith in his arms, the others aside from Hershel, Axel, and Carol notice the new, clean bandannas wrapped around his palms like bandages. Axel had watched the whole time, not sure if it was his place to come down and make sure Rick was only tilling the soil and not trying to kill himself with manual labour, and Rick doesn't like to think himself the kind of bastard that would've told anyone but Daryl or Carl to back the hell off but he knows he would've – he's grateful, as awful as it is, that Axel was still so insecure about his place with them.

Carol had noticed next, having seen Rick inspecting his hands while he stumbled back into the shade, and put the wet washing aside to come look. She purposely pressed on one of his swelling blisters a few times just to make him wince, but he wasn't going to ask why she did that, if it was just some desire to inflict pain or if it was the actions of a scolding motherly figure.

Hershel had patched him up, and Carol had given him clean bandannas because as sad as it was to think about, they'd run out of clean, usable bandages some time last week when Maggie stepped on a piece of glass in an empty cell in a different block. Neither she nor Glenn had been particularly forthcoming about how the injury had even occurred.

He kept to himself the rest of the day. The evening meal was the first time the rest of the group, aside from Daryl and the ones who already knew, got a look at his face. If he looked as tired as he felt, at least that would explain the concerned babble from Maggie about getting sleep and not taking the night watch.

Oh yeah, he was supposed to be doing that tonight, wasn't he?

"I'm okay, I can take it," he says, even though he damn well knows he can't.

"Rick," Hershel starts, "I think all of us woke up to your pacing at least some point in the night," the older man remarks, and Rick winces. The reason he'd gone back to his cell just before dawn hadn't been to try and get sleep – he was so far from it at that point he didn't even care anymore – but because he became very suddenly aware of just how noisy the catwalk was, how it creaked and groaned not because of instability but because that was just how metal was. The galvanized steel grate below shook with each of his heavy steps, and the fact he shared a cell-block with the rest of his improvised family hit him after about an hour of walking back and forth.

"How much sleep did you get?" Carol asks, finally sitting down with her own bowl after serving everyone else theirs.

Rick, nursing Judith and intent on feeding her before he touched his own food, wasn't so sure he avoided looking up at them because he preferred looking at his daughter and not because he knew they'd disapprove. "I didn't," he says. Even the brief moments of unconsciousness he managed to scrape in didn't quite count as sleep.

Daryl's standing by the stairs like some kind of prison guard, but for the moment Rick's the only one who notices his absence from his side. The others are too preoccupied with the fact Judith's weakly squeezing one of the loose ends of the green bandanna around his right hand to notice what else was wrong with the picture.

"What happened to your hands?" Glenn asks when no one else would.

"Forgot to use gloves," he shrugs, because everyone knew by now he'd fallen head-first into the husbandry side of prison-maintenance, and they all knew which gloves he meant. Daryl kicks off the hand-rail he's leaning against, and for a moment he moves as though to take a step closer. Rick looks at him just in time to see the brush of concern fade to nonchalance, and then a misplaced smirk.

Like he wasn't upset about Rick getting hurt at all.

A few weeks ago, he was spitting fire about having to shoot through Rick's leg because the angle didn't allow him a clearer shot and he was trying to shoot through a chain link fence. He got flustered at the thought of Rick stitching or bandaging himself up. Now, he's got this small quirk in the corner of his mouth like he's _happy _Rick injured himself.

_I don't know this man at all,_ he thinks. Judith finishes her bottle, and it's Beth who takes her, but she hands her to Daryl almost straight away, seeing as he's the only one who's finished his broth and he's just standing their like the puzzle piece that doesn't fit. Daryl doesn't speak, Rick noting he'd yet to hear the other man's voice today. He just accepts the baby with a welcoming gesture of his hands after setting the empty bowl down, then walks off into the cell-block humming nonsense at her.

"He's been weird all day," Beth says speculatively when he's out of earshot, mouth pursing to the side. He could see she was weighing up whether or not to follow him, but she must've remembered that Daryl was as easy to read as a foreign instruction manual without the courtesy of diagrams. Rick was lucky to have had the moments he did where the hunter seemed to forget he was actually speaking to another human being, one who was absorbent and preferred listening to other people chatter away.

He'd been lucky to have a lot of things. He was pretty good at losing them. Easy come, easy go.

"Hasn't said much," Glenn dismisses, "he has those days sometimes."

"Yeah, when someone pissed him off," Maggie reminds him.

"Daryl is as Daryl does," Glenn shrugs. "He'll be fine." He's looking right at Rick when he says this, and though he doesn't know why, he offers a nod the same as he would to Daryl, and that seems to be all the confirmation the young man needs.

So for that moment, he pretends to forget about Daryl, who is somewhere in the cell-block playing with his daughter and ignoring everyone's existence.

Despite everything, despite knowing it was his fault – him and his stupid crush – he wonders, because it can't be all over a few mixed feelings, right?

_What did I do?_

.:.

* * *

**A/N:** I'm so damn happy with the response this fic is getting - I'm glad so many of you are satisfied with the progress of the story. I hope I didn't crush too many of your hopes with this chapter. I know that it's frustrating not being able to get inside Daryl's head, but that's the entire point - some of your theories are quite good, though! One more update until Christmas, too...wow, where did the year go? I swear I went to bed in August and suddenly it's December.

I caught up with some close friends this weekend (there's a point to this). Anyway, it was a weekend for revelations, because my best friend has just now informed me - and I'm the first person she confided in - of her interest in wicca and about her pagan beliefs (up until two days ago, I thought she was Catholic, or at least Agnostic) and I surprised her by not freaking out and instead offering to take her to a witch shop she had no idea existed. I've been friends with this girl for years, and she's only just got the guts to tell me about this_ now_, though fair's fair because I'll probably never tell her about my FFnet alter ego. My point being, you can think you know people, but you only know as much as they're willing to let you know. Actors are like that, Characters are like that, and I want you to keep in mind that, as the protagonists of this story, Rick and Daryl are like that as well :)

Regarding the end of this fic - thankyou for the people who gave their opinions last chapter. It's helped me work out how far this is going to go.

I'm also trying to write this while Bella Swan's being brutally cut open in my living room, and all I hear is screaming - Why the hell are my parents watching the Breaking Dawn movies? Mysteries of the universe, ha!

**Love, MK**


	7. Sapien VII : Amniote

**Sapien**

_Part VII : Amniote_

.:.

Rick thought himself stubborn, but he had nothing on Daryl fucking Dixon.

Six days later, and he's pretty sure that if he were to tell Daryl the world was round – _presuming he'd stand around long enough to listen in the first place_ – that he'd vehemently claim it was flat. That's right about how stubborn he'd been this past week.

The others had noticed by the second day that Daryl's odd – though not necessarily foul – mood could be placed squarely on Rick's shoulders. Rick was, after all, the only person Daryl was ignoring, or at least avoiding as much as possible while living atop of one another.

He knows it isn't true, but he's pretty tempted to start believing that if he were to stop breathing, Daryl wouldn't blink twice about it, which was foolish and childish and he'd rather not wonder where the hell _that_ pathetic strain of thought had come from. _He'll come around,_ he keeps repeating to himself, _he'll tell me what's going on with him. _

It probably wasn't very fair to say it was all Daryl. He'd like to say the sudden silence between them wasn't for a lack of trying on his half of the court, but that just wasn't true either. Once he realised they were strangers again, he hadn't done anything to stop it, and while a lot of that was respecting Daryl's space and giving him the time to work things out in his head, there was a bit of fear there.

Fear of rejection or just plain fear of Daryl, it didn't really matter. He was too chickenshit to corner the guy one way or the other, so he did the next best – or worst, he hadn't worked it out yet – thing, and left him to brood.

_A few days_, Rick figured,_ eventually he'll have no choice. _

He was giving it a pretty good shot, though. He wasn't _completely_ ignoring Rick, or else lily-livered or not something would've gone down and it might not necessarily been either of them that started it. He still looked at Rick, and he acknowledged small gestures when it came to security or the three skinny rabbits he'd shot just outside the fence yesterday, but that was as far as it went. The looks were hollow, observational only, but just like with all of Daryl's impassive moments, a storm was brewing underneath.

The idea of pushing just that little bit too hard and releasing the typhoon of Daryl's temper, purely by accident yet completely inevitable at this point, wasn't something Rick had any plans on doing himself, until he realised that it was either him or someone else. He'd rather take the brunt of the tempest he'd caused than allow Carol or Axel or someone else get lashed by it. He'd just rather not face it at all.

Six days was a long time, even for the two men with the fewest words, to not speak to one another. It took until now for Rick to realise they spoke more than even he had thought, and that the moments in one another's company were aided by words rather than broken by them. They may have never been the kind of people who talked about where they grew up or the people they dated or the jobs they had before the turn, but it was something enough to be sorely missed now that it was gone.

Rick longed for Daryl's abrupt wisdom, his rare cocky moments, his dry sarcasm and rare dark sense of humour, his surly attitude in the morning, the way they squashed together in their seats when there was plenty of room for both of them, and hell he even missed the way Daryl was confident enough to boss him around a little bit. That was something no one else had had the guts to do since he took complete control of the group.

He missed that Daryl would say he was hopeless at looking after himself, because really if anyone knew it would be the man who saved his ass more times than either of them dared to count. He missed the surprises Daryl would come out with, how just when Rick thought he had him figured he'd turn around and suddenly start joking with him, or how he'd cradle precious Judith like she was his own daughter.

Six days had never passed so slowly. In the weeks they were on the run, adrenaline had the days flying past at an alarming speed, and even though they were surviving they weren't actually _living_. Always running, always protecting, always scavenging. They were living like a pack of wild dogs.

Daryl was the cat who didn't belong but stuck around anyway, bringing back dead things to keep them alive and shunning attention until he so chose it, taking to them fiercely even if sometimes he didn't seem to like them at all, fully prepared to tear out the throats of anything dead or alive that threatened them.

Unless he'd just been reading the other man wrong, and Daryl in fact didn't care whatsoever about him to begin with.

_That's not fair,_ Rick thinks, watching Daryl cross the catwalk from where he stood in the doorway of his own cell, _I pretty much pushed him away. Not that I could help it. He wanted the truth, didn't he?_

Everything was so tattered and confused right now, but nothing made quite so little sense as his friend's bipolar behaviour. When he'd left Rick's cell that night, it could as well have been thought that everything between them was completely sorted out. Come morning, Daryl was as cold as ice.

Maybe he just needed the night to process Rick, of all people, wanted to suck his dick, or however the hell he took the half-assed confession.

"Daryl," he calls out from his cell when the younger man makes his way back, a few items of clean, dry clothes slung over his forearm. Thankfully the hunter freezes, obeying out of habit. "Can I talk to you?"

Daryl shrugs, bare shoulders strained with lines of muscles that could only be from stress. Rick's starting to feel desperate. He hasn't heard that seductive Southern voice in what felt like weeks. Daryl doesn't particularly know what to do, either, if the way he's glancing around for an escape is any clue. He'd only been able to ignore Rick as long as the other man allowed it, but now that barrier was broken.

He could imagine the redneck was probably chewing his tongue in thought.

"Would you just look at me for two seconds?"

Although he does what Rick asks, and right down to the millisecond too because he looks back over his shoulder literally two seconds after staring through Rick's face and into the wall behind him, there's a faint curling of his lips that's unpleasant, a fierceness to his already narrow eyes that makes Rick feel like taking a step or two back. Maybe slamming the cell door for good measure. Too bad he can't do that.

"Talk to me," he pleads, ignoring the way one of Daryl's sharp eyebrows peaks upward skeptically even though he's fixated on the dusty highlight windows from the side. "You goin' on a hunt soon?"

Daryl shrugs again, one shoulder this time.

"You're not gonna make this easy on me, are you?" Rick sighs, and when Daryl peers at him from the corner of his eye, he nearly laughs a bitter laugh, because if this wasn't like one of Lori's preachy romance movies he didn't know what else would compare. "What do I have to say to fix this? I need you. I need to know you've got my back. I'm sorry, alright? I should never have said anything." Rick waits, hoping for some kind of reaction, but Daryl just keeps looking across at the highlights and grinding his teeth. Rick wasn't no masochist, and if Daryl was really this determined to go on pretending, he wasn't going to stand there like a jackass. He wasn't particularly sure he could, anyway.

Only a few seconds without response passed heavily between them, but it dug its heels in nearly as far as its claws.

"I'll...let you get back to what you were doing."

Daryl darts across the catwalk like Rick had thrown him, storming off with streamline legs that vanished him down the flight of stairs before Rick had taken another breath. Disappointment sunk coldly down his throat, like a rock he'd forced himself to swallow, sliding down hard. He wasn't even sure he had a right to the feeling, but it was there, heavy and unnatural. He wanted to rip it out.

.:.

* * *

Daryl didn't reappear until just before they all sat down for dinner. He was already at the table, Glenn talking at him about something that didn't require any conscious input, and Rick wondered what would happen if he went over and took the empty seat beside the other man. It was odd having to think about something like that.

Would Daryl keep ignoring him? Would he ask Rick to move? Maybe he'd get up and move himself. He's not sure which'd be more humiliating, or make him feel more like an asshole.

The others were watching, waiting, too tempted by curiosity to pretend they weren't looking between Rick and Daryl and waiting to see what would happen. Daryl himself was staring firmly at the table-top, acutely aware of Rick's presence behind him and trying not to respond to it, baited just as much as the rest of them to see what their leader would do.

Rick knew Daryl was waiting to see whether he'd take the seat or find a different one, and that was why he sat down on the concrete stairs instead, a steaming bowl of lumpy porridge and honey passed to him by Beth.

No one had asked them what was going on yet, and perhaps Rick thought they'd be able to work it out before the others tried stepping in, but something about how distanced they became overnight nearly a week ago became all the more real when they wouldn't even sit next to one another. It was really nobody's business but theirs, but Rick was more than just the tiniest bit grateful for his son's impatient attitude this night.

He'd spent the hour after dinner discussing the next supply run the following day with Hershel and Glenn, wherein they'd tried to sketch out who exactly would be going, and Glenn had very bluntly asked whether Daryl or Rick himself would be taking this one, like it was pretty damn clear they wouldn't be going together. For some reason, Rick had just assumed they would like old times, but maybe it was for the best, seeing as their communication wavelength was shot to shit.

Still neither of them asked, but something about the way Glenn kept casually bringing up Daryl's name – Daryl thinks we should give this place a shot, Daryl says we should take one more person this time, Daryl says we should try looking for some of this – told Rick he wanted to.

Maybe it would've been better to talk to someone about it, ask what he did wrong and how he could fix it, but he wasn't completely certain anybody would understand. Rick didn't understand, and Daryl sure as hell didn't know what to do with what little he'd been told. He didn't even know what everyone's stance on homosexuality was, and shit, he could finally feel a case of identity crisis coming on.

The twinge of hurt he felt whenever he looked at Daryl when the other man refused to look at him in return reminded him of when things first started to go downhill with Lori. It was the exact same feeling he got the first time she got out of bed and walked into the ensuite when Rick started kissing her neck, like he'd done something wrong and he should've known what it was, but he only ended up apologising each time none the wiser to what had set her off.

That first time, watching his wife throw herself out of the covers and storm away from him, it stung something vicious. For some reason, Daryl ignoring him was starting to feel exactly like that.

After deciding that he would go on the run in place of Daryl, because he really needed to get out of this damn prison and clear his head for a bit and unless they could come to some kind of acknowledgement Daryl would just have to accept that, he decided to get some fresh air. Not that the air was really all that fresh outside either, the lingering smell of death and stagnant water making it just that little bit harder to breathe, but it was the best option he's got until the next morning. He'd manage.

He doesn't even go that far. He's leaning on a cold brick wall, the corner of which had started to crumble and fall away in dusty red chunks, just staring up at the stars peeking through the gaps in the clouds, drifting. He's starting to feel heavy, bleary vision and tired limbs urging him to go back inside and lie down, to sleep off the uneventful day and the pangs of rejection he'd been trying to ignore until now. He stays a little longer, thinking about the way Daryl would walk out of the room whenever he appeared, and would talk to everybody but him even when the others tried urging him to speak up. His insides are twisting like a mating ball of snakes, nervous and wild and perhaps 'fresh' air wasn't such a good idea after all - not if it meant the freedom for his thoughts to run amuck.

He almost does go inside, too, but he hears the grating sounds of shoes scuffing on concrete. _Carl_, he thinks, hearing the distinct toe-heel drag, but then he hears another pair, and at first he's pretty sure it's Oscar. Then there's a metallic _chink_ just around the corner of the broken brick wall, not six feet away.

"Why do you smoke?" Carl asks, his shoe scuffing in that way he does when he's curious and not sure he should be asking questions. There's a snap of a lighter into the otherwise hush night, the sound of crickets and walkers beyond the walls such a similar white noise now that they barely register it anymore. The pause near drives Rick mad.

"Why ya always askin' me things, kid?"

"'cause otherwise you wouldn't talk to me."

"Yeah ah would." Carl snorts. "...yer probably right. I 'unno, never took much ta talkin' ta people."

"Like my dad?" Carl asks. Rick can just imagine the way Daryl's eyes would have slid over to Carl, blowing out a mouthful of smoke and staring at the boy with vague irritation. "You haven't been talking much to him, lately."

"Trust me, yer dad don' wanna know what ah've got ta say."

"You guys fighting?"

"An' there ya go 'gain, askin' shit you ain't got no business askin'."

"Are you?"

"...I...don't think so. Yer dad's a fucken idiot, Carl, an' don't you forget it." Carl giggles a little, and Rick's not sure if he should feel amused or insulted. "Don' worry, kid. Yer dad 'n I, we'll get it sorted."

"I hope so," Carl says. "It's so strange seeing you both like this. What happened?"

"...yer a sly one, ya li'l shit, but you ain't getting' nothin' outta me."

"I aint a kid anymore, you know. I'm not stupid, neither."

"Ne'er said ya were," Daryl says, and though it's placating he doesn't sound any different. He always was one of those 'take it or leave it' kind of people. If he insulted someone by accident, as far as he was concerned it wasn't any of his business how they heard what he said, so he had this habit of just brushing it off as nothing serious. It was oddly calming, actually, but maybe that was just for people like Rick who weren't exactly familiar with their tempers. "It just aint yer business, an' yer gonna have ta learn some day that I don't gossip."

"Fine," Carl concedes, but unlike when Rick tells the boy something he doesn't want to hear, there isn't any venom behind it. He actually accepts what Daryl tells him, and Rick thinks if they ever do 'get it sorted', he's going to have to ask how to do that. It'd be nice to tell Carl what to do and where to be and not get lip for it.

"I'll tell ya 'bout how I started smokin', though, if ya want."

"Okay," Carl perks up. Rick finds himself straining to listen a little easier.

"After me Ma died tha way she did, I swore I'd never pick up a smoke mah whole life. I was just a kid, mind you. Anyway, Merle wasn't really around much when I's was growin' up, an' when I was 'bout yer age, he went into tha army. Without him ta beat mah ass when I did stupid shit, I started goin' ta parties real young, started drinkin' a lot, ya know? I had some dumbshit friends, let me tell ya. One of 'em had an old man like mine, but he was real strict like. Went lookin' fer his boy an' found 'im at this party, smoke in his hand an' everythin'. So this friend, he turned ta me an' said _'here, take yer cigarette, man, this looks bad'_, an' I just took it. I wasn't gonna keep it, but he and his old man just stood there waitin', so I had ta take a drag. I was a passive smoker 'cause of me 'rents, so I didn' cough or nothin', an' he got off tha hook with his dad. After that, it was just like 'fuck it, might as well'."

"But smoking's bad for you," Carl argues, and Daryl actually coughs out a laugh.

"Yeah, but back then, smokes were real cheap, an' kids could go into tha store an' just buy 'em themselves. There weren't all those stupid campaigns about cancer or emphysema or none of that. Everyone smoked, an' back when yer dad an' I were kids, people thought it was badass. People like yer dad, they didn't really care about all that, but the kinds of people I hung with kinda thought they were tough shit."

"Like you?" Carl asks, and Rick's not so sure it's an innocent question and not a tease. Daryl isn't so sure either, because there's a slight thump and Carl cries out 'hey!'.

"Smartass," is Daryl's way of explaining himself for no doubt cuffing Carl over the back of the head.

Rick wants to hear more. He wants to hear Daryl talk about his friends, about the choices he made as a kid, hell he'd even listen to stories about Merle. Unfortunately, Daryl wasn't talking to him right now, but he was talking to Carl. If only he'd answered the boy's earlier questions about what was going on with them, because maybe then Rick might actually know.

"Can I try?"

"What."

"That...can I?"

"Yer dad'll kill ya," Daryl points out, and Rick realises Carl's asking about the smoking again. A paternal flare of panic starts to unfold inside him. "You don't go starting bad habits in the damn apocalypse."

"I just wanna try it."

"...fine. Here."

_Wait, what the hell's he doing?_

"What do I do?" Carl asks, and Rick feels the worry starting to gnaw at him. Is he going to have to reveal himself, explain that he'd been eaves dropping, and kick Daryl's ass for letting Carl smoke all at once?

"Take a really deep breath, kid. Suck it in hard."

"'kay," Carl replies, an edge of excitement that Rick doesn't miss. There's a beat, two, then violent coughing and the thuds of a hand hitting his son's back.

"You a'ight? Ya aint asthmatic, are ya?" Daryl asks, the thudding noise dying away and Carl's ragged hacking growing muffled, probably into his hand or his shirtsleeve.

"No," his son wheezes out, "oh my god, why the hell do people do that?"

"Awful, aint it? Good. Now, go rinse yer mouth out an' get a drink a water, an' don't tell yer dad 'bout it. Go ta bed."

"But-"

"Now, Carl," Daryl tells him firmly. The boy hesitates, then scuffs his feet in the opposite direction, going back the way they came and thankfully not continuing around the corner to where Rick was standing. "And Carl? You know smokin's bad fer ya, right? Good man."

It all made so much sense now, why Daryl had given in, why he's so good with Carl where Rick finds himself unable to be. Letting Carl learn for himself rather than just telling him how it was going to be – that was something Rick's never seen before. Lori had been obsessed with controlling every aspect of Carl's childhood: who he was friends with, why he could play with the neighbours on the left but not the right, what he ate, when he went to bed, how much television he could watch, what sports he was allowed to play in school, and after the turn she'd been adamant about keeping him as innocent as possible. Rick honestly thought that was the only way for a parent to be.

His own parents had been like that, and he'd hated it.

He waits until Daryl's ground the cigarette butt out on the pavement and turned back the same path Carl ventured before moving, too afraid of making any sort of noise to give him away. Daryl was a lot of things, but he was an honest man, and he expected honesty in return. If he found out Rick had been spying on him, he'd probably be a hell of a lot madder than 'thou-doth-not-exist-to-me'.

His dreams are filled with smoke this night, hazy visions of a man walking too far ahead of him to reach no matter how fast his feet ran, arms swaying and the flashing of horizon's lights glowing about his silhouette. He never catches the figure, who fades like smoke through his fingers when he's finally close enough to reach.

Each time the smoke fades to thin grey wisps that curl sensationless around his fingers, something in him grows colder. He wakes the next morning to Beth, arms full with Judith, knocking on his cell door, and feels oddly unrested and achy all over. He doesn't remember his dream.

.:.

* * *

The problem seemed to fix itself after Carl and Daryl's little conversation. Granted, Daryl wasn't exactly playing footsie under the table or talking about the good old days, and it probably had less to do with Carl and more to do with the fact Rick nearly died on that stupid supply run the next day, but things were looking up. Oddly enough, Rick was just glad Daryl had grabbed him, no matter how forcefully, and ripped the rag away from his wrist to inspect the wound, never mind the fact he was millimeters away from having bled out all over the back seat of the car. Rick couldn't seem to forget the look on Daryl's face, blanched from shock and eyes so wide the blue of his irises had struck out vividly from the frame of dark lashes. That expression of pure fear never left, even after everyone was reassured it wasn't a bite, and the rag held tightly once more over his still bleeding wound.

Maybe he was woozy from bloodloss because he actually grinned at Hershel when he was asked how he was feeling.

"He alright?" Maggie asks, detached and business like as usual while carefully checking the wound in his wrist for fragments.

Hershel's white brow raises at the toothy smile. "He's lost a lot of blood. Any further to the left and we'd have had a hard time stopping the bleeding. As it is, it's probably going to get infected, and we might need to watch out for tetanus. I'm confident he'll be fine, though."

"I meant that," Maggie points to the glazed look in his eyes and the swooning. "Either he's a masochist, or he don't feel a damn thing."

"I think maybe it's something a little more personal than that, dear," Hershel tells her, but doesn't elaborate further, before going back to sterilizing the needle. "We're going to need more suture thread 'cause we're about two more pieces of glass and a supply run away from running out."

"I'll tell Carol," Maggie assures her father, sliding off her knees and taking a handful of bloodstained cotton balls with her. "You gonna be alright to sew him back together?"

"I'll do it," they hear from the open cell door, Daryl lingering just barely out of sight with a hand on the frame of the iron door. He pushes into the room when no one protests, slinging his crossbow off his shoulder and leaning it against the wall, taking the bottle of rubbing alcohol from Maggie's hands and cleaning his own with it. Thankfully that was about all Daryl needed to do, seeing as dirty fingernails didn't fly with the man, probably attributed to the fact he ate with his fingers most of the time.

Rick isn't paying much attention to anything but those hands, now, anyway. He doesn't quite notice when Maggie bows out of the room and Hershel sits back on the creaky desk to watch. Daryl pretends the old man isn't there and starts into Rick the second Maggie disappears, moving to sit on the bunk beside their dazed leader at the same time.

"You should'a jus' let me come with ya," Daryl growls at him. "Fucken dumbass, ya can't keep outta trouble for just one pissy little supply run? How tha hell're you still alive?"

Even when Daryl's thumb 'accidentally' presses down hard on the edges of the gaping wound on his wrist, sending a sharp injection of pain coursing through his bloodstream and wracking his arm with small tremors for as long as it took Daryl to adjust him into the right position, he can't help but crack a smile. At first it's with gritted teeth, until those fingers finally let go of their clamp over his skin and Daryl turns to pick up the needle and the nylon thread. Then Rick's just smiling, because he really can't help it.

Daryl notices. "The hell's yer problem?" he snaps.

"You're talking to me," Rick says, knowing he'll feel stupid later when his body's replenished the blood that coated the back seat and a large portion of his front. It'd literally sprayed out of the wound like a faucet, and for a sickened moment, Rick thought he was going to die. He didn't. He made it back to the prison thanks to Glenn and Oscar, and he even managed to stay a version of conscious the whole way.

Daryl's glare softens then, a faint widening of his eyes before the corners pinch again, only this time it isn't out of anger.

"'m sorry," he murmurs, and what he's apologising for Rick doesn't really know. He's just damn glad to hear the other man's voice and not have to be hiding around a corner for it. He doesn't even take into account that he's actually hearing a legitimate apology – the word 'sorry' was used and everything. This was a good day.

Hershel watches the entire time, though Rick's all but forgotten he's there. Daryl uneasily turns Rick's wrist into place by his hand, stitching much more gently than he'd done to Rick's thigh, this time being careful not to jostle the wound too much. Rick wanted to believe it was because he really was remorseful, but it was probably just because of where the wound happened to be, or because Hershel was impersonating a hawk.

He pretended, nonetheless.

"You're getting good at that," Rick says, and even though it's a compliment it's not a very good one. Daryl frowns, and that glimmer of anger is back.

"Yer makin' a habit of cutting yerself open," is Daryl's biting response, "stop it. An' stop smiling while yer at it."

"Distracting?" Rick teases, and at the way Daryl closes off just slightly, he wishes he could've retracted it.

"Ya look fucken mad, covered in blood and grinnin' like that," Daryl says, unsurprisingly without any particular inflection. Probably because it's not so unfamiliar a sight afterall. "Ah know ya missed me, but ya can chill out. I aint goin' anywhere."

"Good. That's good. Thankyou."

"Whatever," Daryl huffs. After a few seconds, he surprises Rick by jabbing the palm of his hand with the needle hard enough to draw just a spot of fresh blood.

"Ow, what-"

"Yer doin' it again."

"Don't you think I've lost enough blood today?" Rick asks, but at least now he doesn't have to force the smile from his lips. The needle stabbing him did its job well enough. Daryl ties off the last of five small sutures, sliding the knife from the sheath at his waist and cutting the thread with a clean swipe. He inspects the wound and Rick can't help but do the same, noticing how much better it seems now that it didn't look like a crescent of his skin had been peeled back like a dissection in a lab. The edges are pink with swelling, and the black lines of thread stand out clearly against his shiny tan skin, but compared to the butchered mess it was when he staggered in here, this was much more promising for full recovery.

His hand was numb and he could feel the pressure of a headache coming on, but Daryl was still touching him, looking at him, and despite the awful pain and the lethargy, Rick felt better than he had in days.

"You okay with helping him into his own cell?" Hershel asks, reminding them both that he was still _right there_, the bastard.

They make it back awkwardly, with Daryl's arm around his waist but a strange distance about him like he wasn't sure just how much he wanted to be there, and Rick managing to veer them off course several times by sheer dizziness alone. At least they make it there, though.

Daryl damn near throws Rick on the bed, heaving out a sigh as he sits down on the end to help pull Rick's boots off. He wasn't asked to do it, but he was doing it all the same, and Rick had to bite his lips to keep from smiling again or else the other man might just walk straight back out of his cell.

"What the hell happened out there?" Daryl asks, yanking off the first boot with such force Rick had to grab the frame of the bed with his good hand to make sure he kept still. He'll remember it another time, no doubt, and feel that familiar heat creeping down his spine as he recalls that strength.

"Accident," Rick grumbles, feeling embarrassed all of a sudden about what had actually happened. "Walker trapped under a car grabbed my ankle as we were running past. Fell on a piece of tin. Glenn came back just in time, else it would've bit me."

"Yer kidding me," Daryl covered his laugh with a cough. "Ya just fell over?"

"Shut up," Rick replies, not quite so snappishly as he would've had anyone else been teasing him about it.

"Scrape yer knees, too?" he asks, starting on the other boot, "Glenn kiss it better for ya?"

Rick stabs Daryl in the side with the toes of his bootless foot. "Like you've never fallen on your face."

"At least when I do, I don't nearly die 'cause of it. Yer useless," Daryl smirks, pulling the second boot off gentler than the first one. Rick shuffles up a bit, so he's slouched against the head of the bed, yanking the pillow up so the iron bars weren't digging into the back of his shoulders.

"Maybe you're right," Rick sighs. He's about to unload something that had nothing and everything to do with Daryl, but he bites his tongue. He doesn't need to start carrying on about the fact he doesn't know how to parent his twelve-year-old son, let alone a newborn baby girl. He doesn't need to sound jealous of the easy way Daryl communicates with his son. He doesn't need Daryl to know he'd listened in on their private conversation yesterday.

Daryl stares at him while he sets the boots down at the foot of Rick's bed, pulling his lower lip in to bite at it. He looks out of place in Rick's cell, perched on the edge of the bunk with his hands now fidgeting in his lap now that they haven't got anything else to occupy themselves with, shaggy hair fallen into his intense eyes and smeared with dirt and sweat. He looks warm,_ alive._

Rick's cell was always so cold and quiet, so full of ghosts, nightmares, smoky dreams he'd never recall in the morning. They hung above his head, covering the room in shadows. Daryl chased those away, a glowing life force full of nervous energy and endless light. _Warmth._

He unconsciously moves his leg closer to Daryl's back, pressing his shin against the lower notches of the other man's spine. Daryl glances over his shoulder, then back at Rick's face, and releases his lip. Rick regrets that his eyes follow the smallest of those movements, sees the faint glisten of saliva and the way the flesh reddens slowly.

He looks like he's just been kissed, and Rick wishes that didn't make him ache with longing the way it does, but at least this time there isn't a physical reaction for Daryl to see.

"You gon' be alright?"

"Yeah, m'fine."

"Just sleep it off. Carol'll bring ya some food in a coupl'a hours."

Rick nods, not sure what else he could possibly say, because Daryl seems pretty eager to get out of here and he doesn't really want him to leave, but at the same time he's not sure he wants him to stay. Daryl returns the nod, though, and even when he's long gone and Rick finds himself impossibly tired but unable to fall asleep, he thinks about the nod and how it's the first time in a week that he feels like things really will be alright between them.

.:.

* * *

He ate breakfast in his cell when Carl came to him with a can of peaches to share between them, but by midday he's restless enough to make his own way to the communal area. He does this regardless of the black speckling the corners of his vision when he first sits up and the fact he feels like he has a pair of dead legs beneath him, and though he was struck with vertigo at the top of the stairs, tasting the peaches in the back of his throat as though they'd never been swallowed in the first place, he makes it there without injury or sudden unconsciousness.

Carol fusses for as long as it takes for him to sit down at the nearest table, no matter how many times he insisted he was fine. She disappears into the cellblock, only to return with Axel and Daryl in tow. The latter of the two men moved immediately to sit beside him, and while it wasn't as close as they were used to, with just enough space that they would only touch if they followed Beth's example and the elbows went flying, Daryl's still sitting there right next to him.

Whatever the hell had been going through this man's head this past week, apparently it couldn't hold a candle to slitting his wrist on a piece of tin. It would be funny if he wasn't still feeling strangely like he was floating.

"How're you holdin' up?" Axel asks, sliding into the seat across from him, but not without grinning and looking between the two of them.

"Considering I'm about three pints of blood lighter," Rick starts, and Daryl turns sharply to him. He makes sure to smile just a bit to ease his friend's nerves. "I'm okay. It's nothing."

"Just a flesh wound," Daryl mutters, and Rick grins. It's what he and the hunter use to say whenever they got hurt during the winter, no matter how bad it was, to keep the others from worrying.

"It looked pretty bad," Axel says, a tone of relief in his voice. "Hershel said you were gonna be alright, but seeing you crawl out of the back of that car covered in blood...man, thought we'd have to put you down."

"Well I'm glad it didn't come to that," Rick reassures, seeing the funny look start to cross Axel's face, fearing he'd said something out of line. So long being abused by that maniac survivor had made him terribly meek – at was a relief Carol had taken to him, not to mention the truce he and Daryl had formed after the card game what felt like forever ago.

It brought him back to Rick's own understanding with Daryl. The two of them had almost always shared an easy chemistry, one that had felt like it'd been tested, and Rick was pretty ashamed that he doubted whether or not Daryl actually cared about any of them.

It couldn't go back to what it was, the knowledge of one too many secrets strung up between them like a noose, but at least they were talking again, and at least Daryl was sitting next to him and looking at him and even joking with him in a way he never really did with anyone else.

Yeah, it'd all be alright.

So long as he could get over this awful lust, of course.

.:.

* * *

**A/N:** I forgot it was Monday because I've had a hectic weekend that included hiking and a lot of bad luck and bruises during said hiking, and now I'm off work for three weeks (Yay, more time to write!) so that's why the update's a little bit late, sorry! I'd tell you more, because it's pretty cool what happened, but it actually inspired another short Rickyl story so I don't want to spoil anything. On that note, I'll be uploading a Rickyl video some time tomorrow under 'I Dream In Black And Grey' on youtube, in case you want to check it out.

I remember when I was writing this part of the fic how hard I have to try to keep Daryl from just spitting out the problem then and there. It's so tempting to just bowl over the plot of the story immediately, and most people forget that they can come back and explain things later, or they just simply don't want to spend all that time writing the cushiony bits in between.

**Merry Christmas** my darlings! I sincerely hope you all have a good day!  
**Love, MK**


	8. Sapien VIII : Mammalia

**Sapien**

_Part VIII : Mammalia_

.:.

"Ah reckon," Daryl starts, only to cut himself off by lifting the fallen branch in his grip with a strong wrench of both arms, mouth a down-turned slash of pale lips pressed tight over his teeth, heaving exerted breaths out his nose. He drags it backwards and out of the way, half burying himself in a bush in the process. Rick watches all of this without even considering offering his help, too lost in his own world. He sees the sweat drenching the other man's entire body, the mess nature has made of him today. Dark patches formed on his stormy grey flannel, mud smears and grass stains up and down the pant legs of his black cargoes; the ones that needed a belt, and kept on sidling lower and lower on thin hips. Rick's holding his breath, watching the play of bright patchy light glowing so brightly it seemed to come from within, seeing it radiate from the gleaming bare skin of Daryl's shoulders and arms.

Daryl pushes the extensions of the wiry bush away with one hand, and the dried leaves of the dead tree limb with the other, stepping through them like Moses parting a sea of green. He's panting, wiping at his brow and leaving just the faintest lines of dirt above his right eye, licking salt from his lips and staggering up to the clear mark in the withering foliage of the forest floor where the branch had been.

He's still panting when he turns around. The squint of his eyes makes it hard to see the way they flicker up and down, but Rick catches it, and he's willing to bet it was with anything other than appraisal. Probably disbelief, if he caught the way Rick was checking him out. Because that's exactly what Rick's been doing, what he's always doing, but usually it's careful, controlled. Today he's having a harder time than usual keeping his eyes to himself.

They're alone, in the woods, and Daryl's sweaty and dirty and breathing hard from the heat of the sun. There's a leaf caught in his hair, and a brand new tear in the knee of his cargoes, and now there's that small line of dirt on his brow that Rick just longs to reach out and wipe away, to feel that burning hot skin beneath his palm. He might not be able to control his eyes but at least he can control his hands just fine, because Daryl might've been tolerating him but that was only as long as they simultaneously ignored _everything_ that'd happened until now. Not that they'd decided on this - he just assumed saying anything would remind Daryl why they'd stopped talking in the first place.

It doesn't stop him from laying awake at night with cruel fantasies flickering through his mind like an old film, teasing himself with silent 'what if's and 'maybe's. Or from staring at Daryl, who was looking more and more provocative as the hour wore on, no matter how unlikely -_ or impossible_ - it was that he was doing this on purpose. Trust Rick to be seduced by a man who wasn't even trying to seduce him in the first place.

"I reckon _you_ are 'bout as subtle as a punch in the fucken face," Daryl says, finishing his earlier train of thought, the expansions of his chest slowing as he regained his breath, sun-sensitive eyes flickering all over the place, from chest to face to the coil of rope over a shoulder. It almost sounds casual, the way he just throws the words out there to tempt conversation, but it's not and Rick knows it.

He's known something was wrong the moment Daryl asked him to help set up some new snares in the forest, _alone_. And while the irrational, lusting part of him, the part that grew wilder from its place hiding in the shadows, had conjured up all sorts of wistful scenarios that stirred him with an unsated hunger, he still heard the loudest truth ringing in the back of his head, replacing desire with unease. _Something's wrong,_ he's been reminding himself each time they stopped, hand on his gun holster and keeping one eye out for walkers and the other on Daryl, neither one of them talking. _He wouldn't've asked me out here otherwise._

Of course, as the minutes stretched on, he'd begun to doubt that, thinking maybe he was just paranoid. Maybe they were better than he'd thought. Maybe this was just like during the Winter, when Daryl would tell him they should go hunt, even though he was never much help. But then Daryl would look at him, chewing his lip, and they'd move on without a word. _Something's wrong._

"What?" Rick asks, though, because even if he knows something has Daryl's head in turmoil, he isn't quite sure how it's _his_ fault...

_...again_.

"I'm talkin' 'bout Glenn an' Maggie eyeballin' us whenever we're three feet away from one another," Daryl says, sounding just a little less stoic. He squats down and starts clearing a space amongst the dead leaves, pressing his fingers into the damp soil underneath to test its stability. For just a moment, Rick watches the shadows form across the other man's back, the curve of his spine so delicate and tempting. He sees the edges of the demon tattoos on Daryl's right shoulder, knows there's more hidden behind his clothes - he's always loved tattoos on other people, but he just never got around to getting one himself, too uncertain. Lori had one, a delicate floral pattern on her hip, and he'd loved kissing it. She'd loved him kissing it.

He wonders if Daryl would like that, would let someone kiss and bite the small ones he'd seen that looked like he'd gotten bored with a pen rather than with a tattoo gun. He wonders if he'll ever know what those two demons mean.

"You even hearin' me?"

"Hm?"

Daryl's squatting still, elbows on his knees and hands hung between the wide 'v' of his legs, staring up at Rick with something of concerned annoyance. "'m talkin' to ya, man. Where's yer head at?"

"Uh..." he starts stupidly, shuffling back a step, because yeah, that_ was_ concern, and he_ liked_ that. Daryl's still waiting. "Your tattoo-"

"-tha Lovebirds are gettin' on mah last nerve," he says, seeming uncharacteristically cold all of a sudden. "They think they know somethin'."

Rick doesn't know how else to take that other than as an accusation, so he treats it like one. "You think we have slumberparties in the guard tower, play truth-or-dare and tell one another our darkest secrets?" Rick asks. He isn't sure what to make of the way Daryl narrows his eyes at him at that last part.

"Whatever. Do something or stop doing something, just set 'em straight or I will."

"I don't know what to say to _you_, what the hell am I supposed to say to _them_?"

"I 'unno, tell 'em the truth, lie, I don't give a fuck," Daryl grumbles, holding his hand out for the rope, but pulls it back before Rick can hold the bundle out for him, balancing on his heels and crossing his arms. "And would you get down here? I aint gonna do all these myself, Good Lord. Tha hell'd ya come for, anyway?"

"You told me to."

"Right," he mutters, "just get yer ass down here."

.:.

* * *

Maybe he should've listened, because whatever was going it it was bothering Daryl, and it really wasn't any of Glenn's business what was - _or more accurately, wasn't_ - going on between them. That didn't stop the kid from saying something when he really shouldn't have.

It wasn't like a huge thing, and could've easily been mistaken for a joke. In fact the others all seemed to think that's exactly what it was, but the problem was that Glenn's eyes were gleaming with challenge. It wasn't a joke at all; he knew that, Glenn knew that, and it was pretty clear Daryl knew that.

Things were going fine between them, what with most of the awkward tension having warn off some time between Rick proving to be adept at setting snares, though they already knew he couldn't shoot a rabbit or a squirrel literally to save his life, and Daryl eventually confessing to letting Carl try his smoke and Rick not jumping down his throat about it.

Really, the progress of healing their relationship could be described entirely with how close Daryl was willing to sit next to him. When things had been rough, Daryl wouldn't even sit at the same table. When they started to get back on regular terms, Daryl started sitting beside him again. Now that things had returned near exactly to the way they were, Daryl was basically squashing Rick into his seat the way they used to - and he was doing it on purpose, too, the prick.

He kept inching over, literally and figuratively pushing Rick closer and closer to the edge, knowing that eventually Rick would have to either stand up or shove him. Rick would've just stayed put and let Daryl press right up to him, but just like the last time, he was starting to feel his body stir at Daryl's proximity and his musky scent that prompted thoughts of exhausting activities completely unrelated to hunting.

It was probably this little interaction that first caught Glenn's attention, but then the hunter began pestering Rick by drinking water from the other man's porcelain mug. If he didn't know any better, he'd have thought Daryl was flirting, but he knew it couldn't possibly be something so outrageous. Really, it was so subtle Rick was surprised anyone noticed at all, but Daryl hadn't been lying when he said Glenn and Maggie's eyes were on them whenever they were close enough to touch one another. When they actually_ were_ touching one another, it was strange just how often the two young lovers would look over at them, so much so that it became slightly off-putting for a man just trying to eat in peace.

Daryl was stealing what was only the third mouthful from Rick's cup in the past twenty minutes, giving the other man a challenging look when he noticed, and perhaps if Rick wasn't so thrown by the surreal feeling of what was happening he might've got in a response first. It was just too damn close to flirting to resist the gentle glow of hope's enticing lies, whispering once again her poisonous 'maybe', pouring honey in his ear.

As it stood, Glenn couldn't bite his tongue any easier than Rick could find his.

"Christ, would you two just hook up already?"

_He's just joking, _Rick tried to tell himself at first, but despite the bubbles of laughter from Axel and Carol and Beth, and even the sly look on Oscar's face, Glenn is stony-faced. Maggie, at least, is looking at Glenn in disbelief. Glenn, however, is staring right at them both, looking in that moment like he was the age to match them rather than barely in his early twenties. He was waiting for something, and truthfully everyone else probably was too. It wasn't like either of them to just sit there like they were.

For a moment, Rick ponders back on the trend of 'married couple' jokes that had lasted for a little over a week or two, started by Rick and Daryl themselves, only for it to dissolve when they had their 'fight' as he'd discovered they'd all labelled it - _maybe it was a fight, but it had seemed so much more complicated than that_ - but had never picked back up again even when their relationship had healed on the surface. Maybe the others could see it had only scabbed over, maybe they could see there was still a wound beneath, and hadn't said anything because of that.

He could feel Daryl growing tense beside him. He responds to Glenn's challenge instead. "Maybe you'll finally have some competition for all those extra night watches," is all Rick can think to say, which probably didn't do much to calm whatever was going on with Daryl right now – he didn't really want to look and find out.

"Competition for what?" Carl asks, and Daryl speaks through gritted teeth.

"Ne'er you mind, little man."

Hershel clears his throat, and Rick feels slightly ashamed of himself for not keeping things more child-friendly with his young son sitting just three places away. Before the turn, Carl only knew of sex in the 'when a mommy and a daddy love one another very much' sense, but after Glenn and Maggie, and after some half-dozen attempts at trying to truthfully explain Judith's conception, he started to clue in on the rest. Rick wasn't looking forward to the teen years, not with Beth being the only logical female fixation.

Everything's quiet. People are hardly even moving their forks about their plates, it's so damn quiet. Rick feels like he's fucked up, or Glenn has, or nobody has and that was just the problem with having a child amongst adults.

"So," Hershel breaks into the tension with his wrinkled brow soaring high, wise eyes pinning Rick into his seat, the one he was much more comfortable in now that Daryl wasn't touching him anymore. Somehow he wasn't really all that happy about it being comfortable. "What are we looking at trying to harvest next?"

The joke was, thankfully, turned around and sent back where it came from, but the damage was done. Daryl's mood had fallen into a sour place Rick didn't want to follow. The hunter was so quick to excuse himself afterwards that Axel not-so-obliviously suggested Glenn hit a nerve. The hum of the group's chatter died a little at that, and Axel looked like he'd rather be anywhere but the centre of attention.

He had no idea just how right he was, but apparently Glenn and Maggie did._ Rick _did.

.:.

* * *

"There you are," Rick exhales to himself, finally spotting Daryl at the end of the quad sucking harshly on a cigarette. He only does it to calm down. Rick realised it some time ago when it occurred to him just how little Daryl actually smoked after the turn. Not enough cigarettes to be a chain smoker, but enough that a hit of nicotine could soothe him when he was feeling a bit frayed at the edges. All things considering, he took quitting an addiction pretty damn well, but then again Rick hadn't known him for the first two months of the Apocalypse so he was only going off what he'd seen for himself.

Ironically enough, considering what he'd said at dinner, Glenn and Maggie are in the guard tower tonight. No matter how Rick tries to tell himself he doesn't care the same way Daryl does about having them looking at him, he knows it isn't true. They're probably up there right now, peering through the windows and watching, betting on what will happen.

But Rick already knows what will happen. He and Daryl will head inside and talk about what Daryl's going to keep a look out for on the supply run tomorrow, then he'll go to bed and Daryl will do whatever it is he does when he's out of sight, which he's been doing a lot of lately. That's how it played out every other time, and tonight would be no different, despite the fact that they just might have an audience, and despite the way Daryl's suddenly looking at him like he'd rather be anywhere else.

_Not this again_, Rick thinks with the urge to groan.

Daryl blows out the smoke through his nose in a huff, bringing the stick back to his lips and pulling hard, the faint orange glow of the cherry fading back until the cigarette was spent. He flicks it on the ground and grinds it with the heel of his boot, and turns around, heading in the opposite direction of the door, probably to walk the fence or something equally as unnecessary.

This wasn't good.

"Daryl," Rick hears himself call out quietly, and Daryl thankfully stops and turns.

"What."

"...are you alright?"

"Rick," he says, brittle and warning, and he's not sure he's ever heard his name sound so awful, "drop it an' leave me alone."

"Drop what?"

"If ya aint got nothin' important ta tell me, then we should just go back inside," Daryl insists, waiting a long moment then approaching, only his eyes were on the door back the way Rick came and not on Rick himself, having changed his mind about his direction. He wasn't sure what possessed him to make a grab for the other man, because he'd been doing his best so far to not initiate any contact, but he just knew he wasn't having his closest friend turn on him again. Not like this, not over a stupid comment by a boy who didn't know any different.

He probably shouldn't have done it, not when there was a wall to one side and a hostile man to the other. Not when Glenn and Maggie were perched up in the guard tower and probably looking down at them. Not when Daryl hated being grabbed, no matter who the hand belonged to.

The forearm crushing his windpipe shouldn't have been quite so anticipated as it was, but the same part of Rick that had made to stop Daryl also knew what would happen if he did. What wasn't so anticipated was that as soon as his back struck the brick wall behind him, thankfully close enough that the force of the shove didn't hurt so much as wind, that the arm would lower to his chest instead, letting him breathe at least. Daryl looked all kinds of furious, looking up at him yet somehow towering over him, holding him in place and staring him down, and Rick felt his heart stutter.

He looked the part of a man who had been pushed too far. Regardless of whether or not it was Glenn who had put him in this frame of mind, it was Rick who backed him into this corner. It was still _Rick_ who pushed him too far.

Glenn wasn't to blame for the fact Daryl had him pinned right now, and certainly not in the way he'd imagined it happening.

"Daryl, take it easy," he whispers, more out of the pull to calm him down than to put distance between them, but he couldn't deny that he'd feel much safer if there was a few extra feet between them right now.

Daryl's eyes, too dark to see their vibrant blue, were watching Rick, scanning his features, taking him in. The same way he did before he'd known for sure, when he was digging for the lie or the hint of a joke in Rick's face. He never found it, though.

He must've found whatever he was searching for this time.

Rick's suddenly aware of the arm across his chest increasing pressure, fingers reaching out to wind into his collar, twisting, pulling down. Rick's heart finds it's rhythm again, but now it starts to hammer, breaths coming out faster with each few seconds they stood here, staring one another down. Each few seconds that passed without event were torturous.

It was an action of passive-aggression and of violence all at once, but even though his brain saw it that way, his body didn't. The fluttering heat was beginning to coil in his muscles, and when he licked his lips in foolish anticipation, Daryl's keen eyes didn't miss it.

Suddenly, Daryl's foot struck out, kicking Rick's legs apart, and a firm body was just as unexpectedly pressed too hard against his own. That alone was enough to ruin him, but when a hot mouth closed over his neck, everything clenched desperately, pure instinct driving Rick's hands to cling to the back of Daryl's shoulders to keep him right where he was, he felt he was truly descending into madness.

"Holy sh-" An arm was still braced over his chest, holding him still, the hand still fisted in his collar, but now Rick understood that it was to expose his collarbone, because teeth were moving to graze over it and Rick couldn't restrain the groan of relief.

Daryl's knee edged up between his legs, but Rick didn't have the chance to panic about its purpose, because the hips against his own ground at just the right angle to prove his own immediate arousal to him. Not that he had any doubts.

After all this time, all this fighting, Daryl was the one making the move, not the other way around.

Rick would've been satisfied if this was all Daryl did, because with the insane heat on his throat sending tingles down his entire body and the careful pressure against his groin, so wonderful and wrong and _right_, he's not sure he'd have lasted anyway. Then Daryl's other hand, the one Rick hadn't even realised wasn't on him because all he could feel at the moment was _Daryl_, moved for Rick's belt, and all his doubt that this wasn't actually happening flew out the window, right with his common sense because there was no way Glenn and Maggie weren't seeing this right now.

Thick fingers struggled with the buckle between the press of their bodies and the concentration of sucking at his neck at the same time. Rick dug his nails into the material of Daryl's leather vest, wishing that it was skin instead, only they couldn't do that out here. They couldn't do anything out here. Rick wanted to say so. He tried to say so.

"Daryl, we-"

He never got the chance. Daryl's arm finally moved from his chest, hand covering his mouth so completely that Rick's entire jaw was smothered with the size of Daryl's palm and fingers. _"Stop talking,_" Daryl whispers against his skin, and Rick was surprised to find that it wasn't even aggressively. Not even an ounce of it when he disconnected his mouth and leaned back to look into Rick's eyes, like he was suddenly unsure about whether he should be doing this.

He stares for just long enough that Rick thinks something's wrong, but the hand covering his mouth slips just enough to grasp at his jaw instead, turning his head up and presenting his neck submissively, like some kind of prize. Daryl's mouth gets back to work on his over-sensitive skin, kissing and biting and trailing his tongue, each breath and the cool night air brushing over the damp skin, a sensation like ice. He loves it and hates it, but oh god, he needs it!

He's needed this so badly, to feel somebody else, somebody warm and alive, someone just as strong as he is. He's needed this, to remind him he's not crazy, that he's a survivor. He's _human. _

Another shiver of cold air over his neck, and everything in him contracts, burns. He digs his fingers tighter, doesn't even consider trying to pull away from the grip on his jaw, rocking his body off the wall without any other aim than to feel Daryl against him again.

He's so distracted by this small target that he doesn't even notice Daryl's got his belt undone and his jeans open until his warm hand is sliding into them and grabbing his throbbing cock, releasing it from the confines with a sense of relief Rick had forgotten the feeling of. The hand doesn't hesitate even once before wrapping around him, the press of their bodies once again so tight, making more than just slightly awkward for Daryl to get some kind of rhythm. Even splitting his attention between his hand and his mouth, Rick wouldn't have noticed much of anything about technique or familiarity or anything of the like. He was already too far gone.

He couldn't hear anything but Daryl's breath, his own, the rustling of clothes grinding together instead of skin. He doesn't even have his eyes open to see anything. All he knew was the friction, that Daryl was_ touching_ him, but more than that – he was biting and sucking at Rick's neck like it was some kind of feast, driving him wild with sensations to the point where he hadn't even registered that his cock was actually in Daryl's fist, not until he gave it a firm squeeze that jolted his entire body with electric pleasure, driving it to move helplessly in search of _more_. He was making small sounds, the only ones he could make, that carried away in the air unheard by all but themselves.

The fingers pressing into his jaw were holding him hard enough to bruise, and it wouldn't surprise him if he did indeed find dark fingermarks on his cheeks and under his chin, but Daryl obviously didn't want him to move, determined to do this by himself. Rick wouldn't have been able to consciously process reciprocation until it was his turn, anyway. His entire thought process was being erased with each indelicate stroke of Daryl's war-torn hand, each glean of teeth over that spot that sent his nervous system haywire. Everything was just a jumbled mess of static and heat and _oh god, yes, Daryl!_

He couldn't talk, not with Daryl holding his jaw like this, but even the man stroking his cock couldn't have stopped the breathy groans that made it past his clenched teeth.

He wasn't sure how long it took to reach the edge, but he felt it building with the faintest sense of disbelief, not wanting it to end but having no choice in the matter. It shook his thighs, strangled his lungs to the point where each gasped breath nearly hurt, closed his eyes tighter than before until he could see small bursts of colour against the blackness, and pulled every wonderful sensation from every point of his body and multiplied them a dozen.

Despite feeling the pressure building, climax took him by surprise, a hand dislodging from the back of Daryl's shoulder and slamming hard back against the wall, nails digging into the grout between the bricks. His other hand flew to the back of Daryl's head, feeling the man biting hard into the junction of his neck and shoulder in response, threading through the long strands of hair from temptation alone. His head flew back against the wall, and though it didn't hurt at that moment, he's pretty sure it should have and he'll probably feel it later.

The hand covered his mouth again just in time, because Rick wasn't able to think right now and he probably would've shouted Daryl's name, while the other one worked over his pulsing member with a sadistic determination to drag his orgasm out as long as possible. Whatever noise Rick was going to make was wrangled into near silence by Daryl's palm, and he shuddered and convulsed against the other man's firm, warm body until the last of the otherworldly tremors passed and Daryl's hand released his sticky cock, but not before forcing Rick to twitch violently at the unbearable sensitivity with one more final stroke.

Daryl pulled back, freeing Rick's mouth so he could breathe, but he didn't move away immediately. Rick wasn't sure if that was because he didn't want to or because Rick collapsed against him then and there, a delayed groan shuddered against Daryl's shoulder as he all but fell into the other man. He wiped at Rick's damp neck with the wrist of the hand he'd brought Rick to such insane pleasure with, being careful not to touch Rick's hair with his fingers, and the musky sent of his own release brought Rick to some kind of consciousness finally.

He was shaking, and though he couldn't for the life of him figure out why, he knew Daryl could feel it. The other hand was resting on his waist almost awkwardly, helping hold him up, but other than where Rick was grabbing him, Daryl didn't seem to know what to do.

It was such a typical _Daryl _reaction that Rick breathed out a faint, disbelieving laugh into the shoulder he was still smothering his face into. Pure habit had him nuzzling faintly at the firm shape of muscle he found there.

"Holy shit," he says under his breath, though he's pretty sure Daryl heard him. He still has one hand curled into dark overgrown hair, though the other's found its way around the other man's waist, so thankfully he only has to find the energy to lift his head so he can pull Daryl toward him. He kisses Daryl's mouth just like he'd planned, slid the hand from around Daryl's waist just like he planned, but something wasn't right. Something wasn't adding up.

When Rick cupped his palm over the front of Daryl jeans, squeezing at his crotch with just the right amount of pressure that, if he were in any state like Rick, should've had him squirming or at least responding physically somehow. He was only half-hard, and that itself wouldn't have been a problem, but Rick realises pretty quickly what the real issue is.

Daryl isn't kissing him back.

In fact, when Rick whips back to make sure he wasn't just imagining it, Daryl looks almost scarily unaffected by the whole thing. His chest is heaving a little, and his throat is working furiously to swallow between every few breaths, but his eyes are impassable and his expression is back to his default surly mask. Aside from the hand held awkwardly at his side, glistening with Rick's cum, and the hand frozen over his crotch, he doesn't at all look like someone who'd just instigated a frantic midnight rendezvous.

Rick looked a beautiful mess, wrecked and spent and still flustered despite it all, but Daryl didn't even look like the person who'd done all the work. He didn't look like he was a part of this.

He feels...cold.

He opens his mouth to say something, anything; a name, a question, a nonsensical sound even; but all that ends up happening is his teeth clack when he slams his mouth shut again. Daryl wipes his hand on his own shirt without breaking the stare they'd become locked in, and Rick's hand falls away from the other seemingly uninterested man's groin completely by itself. He isn't at all surprised that Daryl leaves him there a moment later, taking off back inside like was his original plan, all the while Rick leans brokenly against the wall with his jeans undone and worked halfway down his thighs from all his wanton writhing.

He must've stood there for several minutes before tidying himself up, but still he doesn't go inside. Eventually his legs grow tired of holding him up at such a forced angle, and they basically collapse beneath him, forcing him to sit on the ground.

For the first time in a while, he isn't sure what he feels, and while he'd thought it'd be pleasant to not desire or fear or love or hate, he only feels numb. Numb, and with the stubborn echo reverberating in his mind like a layer over what should've been a good memory, telling him he'd used his best friend and that he was a horrible person for it.

He figures it must've been over an hour before he gives up the hope he hadn't quite realised he'd had that Daryl would return for him, and just goes inside by himself, uncomfortable with the way his shirt sticks to his stomach and his jeans sit out of place against his nethers like they're a size to small. The entire time he sat there, staring across the quad in his absence of mind, he couldn't bring himself to look over to the guard tower, and now that he was finally going back inside, he wondered for the first time how the hell he was going to face Glenn and Maggie tomorrow, provided they'd witnessed anything at all.

How the hell would he face Daryl?

How could any of them look him in the eye knowing what he'd done?

It isn't until he pulls off his clothes to go to bed, finding a stiff patch on the bottom of his shirt that could only be one thing, that an actual emotion starts to register in the cavern of his chest. And then another, and another, until he is knocked so unsteady on his feet by all the gross sensations of ugly emotions that he has to sit down on the edge of his bunk, wearing only his socks and lit only by the faintest glaze of moonlight. He stares at his hands, and even though his night vision is poor and the light in his cell is so dim it's hardly possible to see at all, he can make out some of the lines and scars. He remembers the feel of leather under his nails, of hair between his fingers, of the partial arousal of another man firm against his palm, of the hand that'd been wrapped around him.

The way he'd groaned behind his teeth and rocked into that hand without self-control, how eager he'd been that he hadn't even questioned it. He hadn't even said anything.

_'Don't talk'_, Daryl had said, and then stared and stared like he was changing his mind or waiting for something, and Rick hadn't said a goddamned word.

He's never been so ashamed in his entire life. It was there, thundering in his chest with such physical sensation he could almost hear and taste it.

He scrapes his nails along the side of his neck, and closes his eyes.

.:.

* * *

His suspicions that Glenn and Maggie saw anything were confirmed when, come the next morning and he entered the dining hall with his daughter in his arms, they stopped whispering amongst themselves and both looked straight up at him. Glenn dropped his eyes as soon as he saw Rick looking back, but Rick reckoned the flash of a frightened look was mirrored on his own face, too, and that made it a little easier to deal with. Maggie's expression, however, was one of such false sympathy that Rick didn't want to look at her anymore. Ever.

He was so embarrassed that they'd seen him like that.

He busied himself with preparing his daughter's formula, feeding her while standing and facing away from the young lovers behind him.

Whatever they saw, at least he wasn't left wondering. Now it was just overcoming the inevitable fall out with the man who had given him exactly what he wanted, no doubt at a price. Perhaps this was a lesson, that he couldn't hope to maintain a friendship and an intimacy with the very same person, so long as that person was Daryl at least.

He should've learned from his mistake the first time. He shouldn't have grabbed Daryl like that. He shouldn't have said anything!

"Good morning," Carol chimes, coming into the room with a smile on her face unlike what Rick had seen in over a year. Axel is behind her, eyes averted to the ground like a kicked dog, and Rick sees him grasp at the back of her shirt for just a second. He'd been doing a lot of that lately.

It's a fraction of a second longer than was enough to understand – a lump of discomfort settles in his throat, and for a moment he's afraid he'll need to pass Judith to Carol because he isn't quite sure how to breathe anymore.

_Was all that last night because of Carol?_

_Is that what I was - a replacement? An outlet for frustration?_

It made no sense. Daryl had gone out of his way to give Rick pleasure, but sought nothing in return for himself, in fact he remained disconnected from the whole thing in such a clinical way that it scared him.

_Just what have I done?_

"Rick, c'mon, give her to me," Maggie's soft voice is urging him, bordering on desperate. Oh, he _did_ forget how to breathe.

He hands Judith to Maggie without hesitation, but she doesn't walk away with the infant like he expected. She stays looking at him, and it hits him in that moment that the concern on her face isn't forced – she's sincerely looking at him like he's somebody worth pitying. She's stroking Judith's head, though the baby hasn't made a single whine, and she keeps her eyes locked on Rick's face no matter how many times he glances down while trying to keep himself calm.

Glenn is looking over her shoulder, a rare look of remorse on his young face. He wonders if the younger man blames himself. Rick isn't going to tell him otherwise.

"It'll be okay," Maggie tells him, nodding jarringly; like not even she believes it and she's trying to convince herself, too. "He'll work himself out. Just give him time."

"What's going on?" Carol asks, Axel at her side, as she edges into the corner of Rick's vision. It's all he can do not to flinch when she brings a hand to his forehead. "You're feeling a bit warm."

"He's just a bit stressed," Maggie explains, before biting one side of her lower lip, realising that Carol wasn't aware of the things she was.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he says plainly, "I'm fine. Give Jude to Beth when she comes out. I've got to get to work."

He watches from his hands and knees weeding one of his small vegetable patches that was miraculously starting to sprout as Daryl leads his bike out the front gates, one of the cars following closely behind. He spends the rest of the day with a pale figure in a luminous white dress at the corner of his vision, but every time he tries to look at her, to see if she really does have the face of his dead wife, she vanishes into nothing, like a smoke machine with a motion sensor.

By the time Glenn manages to force him back inside, he's shivering with sunstroke and his hands are blistered and bleeding. Hershel orders him to bed, and he doesn't bother arguing because he's so damn cold even though his skin's burning to the touch. He has crystal dreams, a thousand tiny facets of memories and fantasies and shapes of smoke and water and ice and fire – things that fall and float through his fingers and burn and freeze his skin when he tries to touch them.

He dreams of Lori's screams, telling him to wake up, blaming him for Shane, for Sophia, crying out for him as he walks away. She demands to know why he doesn't love her anymore, the colours of her face fading to grey as she begs him not to go. He hears her voice ragged with pain, the wails of an infant smothering the sound, until that too is eased with the hushing of a voice that was more of a feral growl than a gentle lullaby, but it was still so soothing because this world is a harsh world. It's not soft anymore._ Shh, baby girl, shh. _Lori's asking him _why_, but her shouts sound like they're coming from underwater. All he can hear is that deep voice drowning her out. _Shh_...

He wakes up several times, feverish and alternating between ripping the blankets off and struggling to pull them back on, but just once, when the light coming through the highlights across the cell block are blood orange with the sunset, he sees a figure standing in the doorway, staring at him. Whoever it is sees his eyes slide open, sees him gnashing his teeth against the cold and straining to reach the covers.

They come into the cell, pull the blankets over him without a word, hovering a hand over his cheek without risking a real touch. They're there for a moment, then they leave, a smell of pine and motor oil lingering for just the faintest of moments. _Daryl_, he thinks, _who else would be too afraid to touch me?_

.:.

* * *

**A/N:** There are a hundred and one reasons why the sex in this chapter might not seem quite as 'hot' as what you're used to reading on here, and not least of them is my personal lack of history writing smut and my sheer embarrassment about the smut I have written before. Provided I did want it to be kind of awkward and all over the place. I couldn't escape writing this story without sex, as a big part of the story is reliant on that particular relationship between the characters and has been from the start, so I just closed my eyes and grit my teeth through the awkwardness. I hope I didn't totally ruin this story with my racy, unromantic sexy scene.

Honestly, you guys have no idea how petrified I was about posting this chapter. I haven't written something like that in_ years_. It's probably totally irrational of me, but I'm so nervous about it... I'm like, a sex-scene virgin, and I'm overly attached to this fic now so I don't want to break it.

P.S. I mentioned at the end of the last update, I hatched an idea for a Rickyl fic all due to a hiking mishap, and now it's become a little fledgling story I'm dying to complete. I've oh so cleverly titled it _'Sticks and Stones'_, which makes sense I promise you. I'll keep you guys updated on its progress toward being published if you like. It's kind of post-pre-slash, if there's such a thing. Like, in between pre-slash and slash. It's complicated, but so is Rickyl.

**Love, MK**_  
_


	9. Sapien IX : Dystrophy

**Sapien**

_Part IX : Dystrophy_

.:.

When Rick woke, the first thing he found himself doing was grasping at the area around his face and shoulders, searching for the blanket that'd been pulled up over him that evening. Not only did he find no trace of the blanket, but when his fingers collided with the back of his own neck he was shocked, even through his sleepy stupor, by the immense heat that radiated between his skin, as well as the unpleasant spike of discomfort that came with touching an area that felt as though it'd been burned. As if that touch dragged him to the conscious side of wakefulness, sensations poured over him from every corner of his body. He could feel the blanket now, tangled about his feet, and somehow stifling hot even against that small, unconsidered area of skin. What he noticed next was how absolutely saturated in his own cold sweat he was.

"I don't think so," came the pleasant old voice of Hershel, out of context and in conversation with another. "It's too mild and fast acting. I suppose we'll have to ask him."

"Should I wake him?" Carol's sweet but stern voice follows.

"No need," is the reply.

Rick opens his eyes what must've been right on cue, because almost immediately Carol is dropping to his bedside, reaching out a hand to touch his shoulder, softly so as to avoid inspiring pain. She didn't quite succeed, because the moment her skin touched the side of his neck he couldn't help but flinch back, stung by the clash of a warm palm on his sunburn. She quickly diverts to running her fingers through his hair; which, although feeling good, still managed to make him uneasy.

"Rick," she says softly, "what have you done to yourself this time?"

He has no answer for her. His mouth feels too dry to even move his tongue, and his lips felt as though they were glued together. At least the fingers running through his hair are kind of soothing, but for some reason her voice is not. He can't remember why, but he knows he doesn't particularly want to be touching her.

"You are absolutely soaked," she observes, rubbing her fingertips over damp threads of hair by his brow, "but your skin is dry. You haven't sweated for a while."

"Dehydrated, maybe," Hershel says curiously from somewhere behind Carol. "Can he move?"

"Can you move?"

It wasn't so much of a question of 'can' but whether or not he was willing to even try. Which he wasn't, not right now, but he didn't have it in him to say so. Instead, he closes his eyes, hoping to just go back to sleep. He knows they wont let him, but he tries anyway.

Carol speaks up again, still running her fingers through his hair, until finally it stops prickling unpleasantly and just continues to soothe him. "What did Daryl say last night?"

"Disoriented, and it looked like he was suffering from chills even though his skin was burning up," Hershel replies, "both symptoms of sun affect. He was out there for hours. I doubt he took a water break."

"He still seems quite scattered."

"He's not yet awake."

Rick had only heard one word. One important word. _Daryl._

Daryl, who had looked upon him like one would a ghost, wrenching the blood-soaked rag from his wrist and ripping the arm from where he cradled it to his chest, fingertips jarring the edges of the wound, causing it to bleed sluggishly over new skin. Daryl, who had thrust himself between Rick and a walker on their first attempt to hunt together, launching a boot straight into the creature's chest, breaking flesh and ribs alike, the sound grim and loud and echoing through the woods that surrounded them. Daryl, who had dipped his chin as much as he dared, peering down the length of his body to try and catch a glimpse of the way Rick had cautiously touched his hand, trying not to give himself away as he searched for a lie, for the truth in that gesture. Daryl, who had caught Rick watching him from across the living room of the cabin they had all holed up in some time during the Winter, winking at him over Carl's head before going back to his demonstration, instructing the boy on how to hold a throwing knife properly.

Daryl, who had made him feel human again for one brief, bittersweet moment, then burned it to the ground.

The man who matters most had walked away from him. That was the loudest response of all, and it screamed in his head in a voice carried through a throat full of curdled blood. And so, he'd watched Daryl walk away, again and again, agonizing regret acidic on the back of his tongue, like the afterburn of sickening amounts of alcohol.

If only he hadn't felt the electricity wired through his body when that hand would reach out to touch him, or hadn't glimpsed that intense look over a shoulder and reacted, or considered at length a lowly indulgence for revenge. How had it built up to this without his notice, those small moments where he couldn't avoid admiring the other man for his strength and skill. Those small interactions, the ones that meant nothing then and everything now, a locked stare or an empathetic nudge, the lives that'd been saved between them and the burdens shared across their combined shoulders. Each day had been a building block in itself – how had he ever imagined it to have only started when a look from Daryl sparked lust within him? How had he not realised the delicate process?

This had been happening for months. It'd only been happening to him.

"H-" Rick wasn't even entirely sure what he'd been planning to say, if anything intelligible at all. His voice was ragged and his mouth felt as though it was full of dry sand. He ends up coughing instead.

Carol is swift, sitting on the edge of the bed rather than crouched beside it, rubbing a hand over the sweat-soaked fabric of his shirt. Hershel hobbles over, crutches under his arms and a lack of any particular expression on his face bar the one that was always there, behind the thick white beard and those eyes that just swam with knowing. Rick wonders if Hershel already knows about his destructive, compulsive need for another man, a desire unlike anything he'd ever felt in his entire life.

"Can you sit up?" Hershel asks, almost echoing their earlier question.

Moving meant pain. He's had worse.

_I brought this on myself,_ he repeats in his head, over and over, even as Carol's bony hand finds itself under the pit of his arm and he has to lever himself up first onto his elbow, and then up the rest of the way. He expected the regular aches that would pulsate in his tired limbs, and even the immediate feeling like he'd strained his back – but it was the sensations of nausea and a headache simultaneously assaulting him that had him buckling over his lap.

"Rick?" Hershel asks, crutches clacking once more on the concrete floor.

The groan that he responded with, low and quiet but definitely one of suffering, only seemed to feed the queasy sensation behind his naval. He didn't even realise he was breathing hard until Carol's hand returned to circling over the back of his shoulders, as though trying to relax him. "Feel sick," he mutters reluctantly, winding an arm around his waist, somehow overwhelmed by this small discomfort.

"I need to ask – it's been months, but I have noticed you don't always eat everything given to you. Have you been eating properly?"

It was a strange question but so long as he could focus on Hershel's voice, even through the sharp throbbing behind his eyes and pinching his temples, it was easier to ignore the feeling like his insides were trying to crawl up his throat. "I eat," he rasps, hearing the grainy texture of his own voice and hating the sound of it.

"Most of us have at least regained some of the weight lost over the Winter, but you have not. It's a hard habit to break, particularly if you cannot recognise the signs of hunger, which is common in people who have either suffered prolonged starvation or overeat, but you will need to stop rationing your own meals."

Hearing this, Rick felt himself flush with indignation. Hershel wasn't suggesting he had a disorder, he knew that, but he didn't see what any of this had to do with how sick he was feeling right now. Thinking back on the past few months, on how often he only served himself half a bowl or plate, or pushed his leftovers in someone else's direction, or skipped breakfast, it became clear how something like that would become noticeable.

"_Don' complain when yer all skin an' bones an' no one wants ta look at ya in case they start countin' ribs out loud."_

Never mind how bad it ached to lift his arms, creases at the base of his neck and the top of his shoulders aggravating the sunburned skin, he forced himself to peel the sticky, damp skirt from his torso, arms still tangled in its folds in his lap as he stared down at his chest. He hadn't given his body much thought, never stopping to look at it in the row of mirrors in the communal bathroom, or examining it for ticks and wounds the way they had to out there. Maybe if he'd taken the time to do so, he might've noticed a bit sooner.

He didn't look ghastly, not the way Lori had, but there was no doubt his body was unattractively thin, not just from under-eating but from overworking. He had some healthier definition at least, but the near complete lack of body fat did nothing but scarily exaggerate what muscles he had developed over time, as well as emphasize certain parts of his skeleton that should not have been as clearly visible. The bottom of his sternum and a few shadows indicating ribs, for example, should not still be there, not if he'd been making the most of their replenished food supply.

Carol and Hershel aren't saying anything, but he knows they're seeing it too, perhaps more clearly than he is.

"_You've done enough."_

Like he was looking from the outside in, still not making the connection that this was his own body, he brings his hand up to trace the sunken pit that marked the end of his sternum, like he could reach a thumb up under his ribcage if he pressed hard enough. Only, he stops moving altogether, because he sees more shadows, more lines that shouldn't be there anymore, and they're in his hand. His wrist is pronounced, almost frail, and the dozens of tiny bones forming his fingers are marked with sharp ridges, the gaps between his knuckles too deep, too translucent. His veins shouldn't be that visible. It could be much, much worse - this was easily fixable within a few weeks at the most - but it was still ridiculous that he hadn't even noticed.

"_Yer shit at lookin' after yerself."_

Not too long ago, they'd all looked like this. They'd all had disturbing, sunken spaces over their bodies, muscles and tendons stretched thin and visible in ways they had never been before, as though the only thing holding them together had been their skin and sheer will. It would make sense that no one had noticed how he'd not gained much weight, especially if they were all used to seeing him like this. He hadn't done it on purpose, in fact he'd been completely unaware of his body until now.

He's disgusted.

"Oh my god," Carol whispers, "you look awful."

_Thankyou, for pointing that out. _

The worst part was that he didn't even feel hungry. At least, he didn't think he did.

Hershel gives a tiring sigh. "I just thought it was taking you longer to come back to health," he explains, "but you are going to need to start eating twice as much, if not more, than you have been. Malnutrition would explain why you've been sick, and perhaps even so prone to injury recently. I doubt you've had a clear head for a long time. Which brings me to my other suspicion – how have you been sleeping?"

"Better," Rick says quietly, though from the hoarseness of his voice it still sounds a bit like a growl. "I wasn't sleeping that great, but I get a few good hours every night, now." Hershel's brow raises again, prompting and full of questions he never voiced, letting Rick find his own way. "I have...dreams, sometimes...bad dreams."

"Nightmares," Carol says solemnly, and Rick winces, though he wished he hadn't. He was giving away too much. They didn't need to worry about him like this – he was managing.

"Yeah, _that._"

"We all do, but everyone's been getting better. You will, too," she tries to comfort, not knowing how much worse that made him feel. He'd figured they all had bad dreams from time to time, even before the turn that was true, but he hadn't known about whether the others had been coping. They'd all seen and done so much, things that would be wrong and illegal and life-changing.

In the Winter, he'd tried to keep an eye on how stable everybody was, wary of another person deteriorating the way Shane had. He'd kept in the background of any conflicts that didn't concern him – there were, surprisingly, many fights over the months – keeping tabs on any shifts in attitude, slowly learning about the people around him at the same time. There were a few times he'd been worried over nothing; such as when Daryl would rapidly withdraw from the group out of nowhere, before they realised he was either avoiding someone who had roused his temper, or simply being cautious with his trust. Other times he made sure to act, such as in the aftermath of Beth's first walker kill, where the girl seemed outwardly fine until he got her alone away from her father. He'd never known a relative stranger whose tears could disarm him like that, but it was the first time he'd embraced someone outside of his family, and it was then that he realised these people actually are his family now.

He'd tried after that to make sure everybody coped, taking them aside after particularly gruesome or traumatising moments, like when Glenn bludgeoned a child-walker's head in with a phonebook, or when Carol put down a delirious survivor they'd discovered nursing a day-old bite. They all had moments where Rick thought they just couldn't handle it anymore – Rick had those times, even_ Daryl_ had those times, but they pulled through and they sucked it up because it was survival, and they had no choice.

But those kinds of choices haunted his nightmares, and apparently they haunted everyone else's. Perhaps the safety of the prison had poisoned him, deluding him into thinking they would all find their strength from a cold place with walls keeping the two worlds separate. Maybe he should've been more cautious about thinking everybody would be alright.

He'd thought he was recovering from the brutality of the world outside the gates, but if he could fool himself into thinking he was alright, then perhaps he'd fooled himself about everyone else, too...

"Rick, are you okay?"

"I thought everyone was alright..."

His words were always so simple, negligent really – like he put all his thoughts and feelings into a sieve and what filtered out was thin, clear, and full of none of the sedimentary knots he couldn't break down into what others could understand. This was his family, and he loved them all so, so dearly, but how were they to know that? T-Dog had vanished from them with barely a whisper, overshadowed by the enormous grief that came with Lori's death, one somehow seeming so much larger than the other.

He hadn't allowed himself to think of Theodore. Just as he had tried avoiding thoughts of Lori, Andrea, Shane, Dale, and Sophia...Their deaths seized him with a cold hand around his throat, stealing his voice. He thought he was okay, which was why he thought everybody else was.

He could hear Lori's manic laughter as though it were ringing clearly into his ear, the other one barely able to discern Carol's voice. Her mousy tone made him feel bitter all over again, and he couldn't remember why he was feeling like this. "We are. Believe me, we are. We're alive."

"That isn't enough," he tells her, because he knows that better than he knows anything right now. _Being_ alive, it was different to _feeling_ alive. Being alive was breathing, a complex series of motions you couldn't control that kept your body thrumming with blood and your brain sparkling with all the pulses of life that Jenner had demonstrated, a process he'd never imagined could be so beautiful. Feeling alive was so much _more _than that.

It was having his son at his side, it was having the others at his back, it was having Daryl look him in the eyes and feeling like everything would be alright.

"You need to look to yourself, now," Hershel says quietly, leaning against the post of the bunk, bowing down just far enough so that Rick could clearly see him. "You have been under stress, we understand that, but you aren't getting what you need."

_How could that be so true, when he doesn't even know the truth?_

"You've been suffering deficiencies for too long. It's easy to get lost in grief, I know that. You told me you were seeing Lori, you said you saw her again, when you walked out the gate and Daryl saved your life," he says, and Rick feels himself stiffen against his will, knowing Hershel saw the reaction to the other man's name and perhaps even Carol felt it under her tiny hand. He hopes they would think he tensed out of resentment for his weakness that day, but Hershel had spoken the other man's name more clearly than any word so far, and Rick knew that hope was lost. "Has it stopped?"

"Sometimes..." Rick replies, knowing it didn't really answer the question. Because he had seen her, several times now, whenever he felt Daryl start slipping through his fingers like sand in an hourglass, counting down the actions and reactions in grains that stuck to his skin like blood, until they would finally, inevitably, be pushed apart for good. Perhaps it had already happened.

Lori was there, reminding him of who he'd already lost, what had happened when he avoided mending broken things. She was in his head while he slept, screaming and crying then vanishing without a sound, much the way she'd done when she died. She'd never left.

"Rick, I need you to listen," Hershel insists. He notices, for the first time, that there is a pitch of concern to his elderly voice that was never quite so visible. He's used to hearing it as an undercurrent, particularly where it concerned Lori and the unborn child, then later when he realised Rick was caving in after laying his eyes on Judith that first time, bloodied and cradled in Maggie's trembling arms. Now it was clear, and Rick had no choice but to listen. "I'm no doctor, you know that, but I think you're going through a psychological burnout. I experienced it myself, before I became a vet. I see some of that in you."

"It's just heat stroke-"

"People carelessly throw that word around, yet they have no idea what it means. You _are_ sick from sun exposure. You can get that from a simple sunburn."

Rick hesitantly roamed his fingers over the flaming hot skin at the base of his neck, an itching sort of pain following the touch like nails scraped over a healing wound. To know that a bit of red skin was the reason for the queasiness that had begun to settle, and the chills he'd been feeling last night, and for the headache that was still chipping away at the inside of his skull – it felt like weakness.

_No_, he hears his thoughts like they're not his own, _what drove you to this was weakness. Weakness for another person. You let that put you on your knees. _

But if Hershel was right, then he wasn't even in his right frame of mind to begin with. Maybe he had no 'right' frame of mind. Maybe something really went wrong, and these hallucinations of Lori would never end. Maybe he was crazy, and he'd hidden that away from himself just like he'd hidden his sleepless-bruised eyes, and his grievous physical condition – not that his mental one was, apparently, any less grave.

"You need to rest."

But he thought of his nightmares, and of Carol's words – _"they're getting better", she'd said, but that's not good enough_ – and he knew he couldn't fail them any more than he already had. Not like he'd failed himself, or Lori, or Daryl.

So he accepts the bottle of water, greedy for it without having realised how much, and picks at the peeling iced tea label that'd faded and unstuck after repeatedly being refilled, listening to Hershel explain to Carol what he'd meant about 'psychological burnout'. He hates the darkening feeling of awareness, and the fear that he might've been running more people than just himself into the ground.

.:.

* * *

Having somebody tell you how much you needed to eat was suffocating enough to almost erase the hunger altogether, but Rick hadn't dared object to Carol's stern orders that he would finish everything tonight and from here on in. No more pushing his plate into the middle, or slipping it to Glenn or Carl – he needed the food. After finally seeing himself, there really was nothing to object to, because he still looked terrible and nobody else did.

_Maybe Daryl thinks- stop it._

He finds himself in the mess hall, looking at Beth directly across from him with Judith in her arms, sitting at the cafeteria dining table. She has an old magazine on the tabletop, the edges of the pages creased and wrinkled with a bit of water damage, but regardless of it being out of date, useless information she would probably never put into practice –_ because those magazines were just full of the different things you could put on your skin, celebrities that were probably all dead by now, and all the names of nailpolish colours, right?_ - she's still got half her mind on it, the other on the baby in her arms that squirms when Beth's eyes roam from her for too long.

Rick realises he's been watching them for a couple of minutes already, and decides to go sit down with them, when Beth suddenly lets out a giggle. "If you don't calm down, I'll have to go find Uncle Daryl, and he'll wear you out just fine," she says, grabbing the baby's foot that jostled her chin, shaking it gently a few times. The baby squeals, and Rick finds himself grinning a little too wide when he sees Beth tug the tiny bootie-clad foot in her mouth, feeling the slight burn on his face disagree with the smile lines that formed at the corners of his eyes. The baby moves her leg, a wide, wet smile forming on her toothless mouth, and Beth releases her from the playful bite. "Yeah, that's right, you like it when _Daryl_ bites your feet, 'cause you love kicking him in the face, don'cha, Chickadee?" Judith laughs, such a rare sound that Rick feels that painful tugging in his chest again, full of love and affection for both girls in front of him now.

Judith was such a quiet baby. She'd been like that in the womb, too, barely a kick for days before dancing up a storm on Lori's bladder. There was always the parental tugs of worry, about how babies who cry too much or too little could be showing warning signs of autism or physical illness, but he'd been reassured Judith was healthy, and now he treasured very little more than he did the sound of her laughter.

And, apparently, the though of Daryl pulling Judith's feet up to playfully bite them in retaliation for excess kicking from excitement. That was something he wished he'd seen for himself.

He wasn't sure if he should disturb the moment between Beth and his daughter, but the blonde girl was looking at him now, no less cheerful but a taint of concern in her eyes regardless, and she beckoned him with a wave. She was always encouraging him to hold his daughter more.

She hasn't closed the magazine by the time Rick approaches, and he's a little shocked to read from the blocky yellow and black title that it's a double-page article about masturbation, a rather crude but still artful photo of a woman with her mouth open and head thrown back to compliment it. Beth was a rather pale girl, and when she blushed, her entire face went so red it clashed with her white-gold hair. Hands full with the baby, she couldn't close it in time to even pretend she'd saved her innocent-seventeen-year-old image, and her cherry-red face turned so rapidly away from him as she scrambled with her free hand to shut the magazine, fingers slipping.

To give her the chance, Rick lingered back a moment, watching her finally manage to close it and then drag it onto the seat beside her, _Cosmopolitan _cover facing upwards. Ah, that was why he didn't expect that – he'd thought she was reading a magazine for teenagers, not women, though he didn't doubt there were some raunchy articles in those as well. It just, somehow, disrupted the picture he'd created of Beth, of this soft-spoken girl who he'd always known Carl would develop a crush on, being so close to his age in comparison and with the looks that made her hard to ignore. Perhaps it was kind of fatherly of him to have pre-destined Beth to an adolescence without being corrupted by the same sexual needs as he had been, like it was a mark that came with adulthood and not before it, like it was somehow a lesser corruption to drive a knife into a walker's skull, or to see the animals she'd loved most of her life shot and skinned and plucked just so she could survive another week.

How was it he'd decided that abstinence for himself would be so difficult to endure, yet it would be so simple for others, especially a teenager drowning by herself with all the hormones that started to flare up impatiently at that age?

"I'm so sorry," she starts to mutter, still burning red and not looking at him, rubbing her hand over Judith's back for something to occupy herself with. "I didn't think you- I'm sorry."

"Don't be," he says carefully, wondering if he should leave it alone and mention it to Carol, or even Maggie might be better. He doubted Hershel would be a comfortable choice for either of them. "Is...uh...this is, I mean..."

"Awkward," Beth supplied.

"Yeah, a bit," he agrees, carefully choosing the seat across from her so that she could meet his eyes without difficulty when she was ready. "You had the...uh..._talk_, right?"

Some of the starkness of her blush had faded, but her cheeks, ears, and neck were still flushed pink when she turns to give him an utterly bereft look over his daughter's head. "I'm seventeen."

"Right, uh-"

"I had the internet. And magazines."

He could feel her defensiveness starting to build, which was intriguing as well as worrying, because he'd rarely heard her lose her temper over the year he'd known her, aside from at her sister and father, and apparently she'd bickered with Lori back on the farm. He can't think of what to do with his hands, so he sets them on the table for a moment, linked diplomatically like he planned on having the talk anyway, but at her confused stare he dropped them both into his lap. She wasn't his daughter, and he'd barely managed to help tell_ Carl_ the basics, leaving most of that conversation to Lori. Beth was a child, and yet she also wasn't.

But Beth was also observant, which seemed to be a common trait among quiet people and so it was hard to hide anything from anyone now. She softens, glancing down at Judith, seeing the drool patch on her shirt and completely unbothered by it. "My mother did tell me a little bit, when I got my first boyfriend."

Rick honestly had no idea what he was doing. "Have you," he starts, then stops. Not sure if the red-hot feeling of his face was from the sunburn or from embarrassment, he glances at the tabletop as though he could see the magazine through it, sitting innocently at Beth's side. She glances down at the magazine and her blush darkens.

"Do we have to talk about it?" Her voice is a mumble, her lips rolling together afterwards nervously.

"No!" Rick says, perhaps a little to fast and loud, "of course we don't."

A minute of awkward silence passes, during which Glenn walks from the corridor leading outside, through the mess hall, and into the cellblock, giving them an odd look at seeing them sitting stiffly together and not talking. Of course, when he actually looks at Rick, he glances down and hurries his step, and a flinch of memory strikes him.

Glenn looking down in shame. Shame at what he'd seen that he shouldn't have. Shame at seeing something that shouldn't have happened in the first place. Seeing _Rick's _shame.

"It's different now," Beth murmurs quietly, and the nausea from earlier stirs faintly. Was she catching on? Would she ask her sister? Would Maggie confess?

But Beth's not looking at the way to the cellblock where Glenn had vanished, or even at Rick. In fact, her face is burning again, but only her cheeks, her ears and neck their normal alabaster white. She's looking at Judith, the buffer for awkward conversations it seems. Judith is asleep on her shoulder, transitioned from giggling to snoozing without either of them noticing, or without any encouragement.

"If I wanted to know something, I could just look it up myself, no matter what it was. I think everyone took that for granted, didn't they," she mumbles. She's tracing an absent pattern over Judith's back, connecting the tiny embroided flowers with no real aim. "And I've tried looking in the library in the rec room, but there's nothing there."

Rick blinks. _That's right,_ he recalls, _there's a library._ He'd rarely been in the recreation room, only venturing in there for paper and pens and for the chess game he had a feeling Hershel would appreciate. It was easier going there than to the administrative building or the observation room in the mess hall, one of which was still too dangerous and the other which still reeked of blood.

But then again, the only book anyone had given him since arriving there was a novel Carol told him he should read, and he had yet to even open the cover.

"I asked Maggie to bring me back some magazines, but I didn't tell her what they were for," Beth continues, a purse to her lips like she was disappointed. "But none of them answered the only question that really matters to me right now."

"What question's that?" he asks, resisting the urge to call her 'sweetie', because that's what Lori used to call her, and he's never called her anything but her name. Daryl calls her 'sweetheart', calls Judith the same, likely to dub any female under the age of twenty worthy of a pet name. For Rick it was different. He never could get a handle on the odd sound of the words people called one another.

"If it's ever gonna happen," she says, sounding too resigned for a seventeen-year-old as cheerful as she'd been these past months. "If I'm ever going to get the chance to find someone again."

She doesn't look embarrassed anymore. Rick finds he doesn't quite feel embarrassed either.

"Life's been too uncertain to make any promises," he says, but before she can start to look disheartened, he keeps on, "or to deny the possibility that there is someone out there, surviving just like us, and that you'll find them."

She's giving him this sincere little smile that gave way to the sadness in her eyes. She turns that look on Judith again. "I always wanted a child of my own. Even with what happened to Lori," she pauses, glancing at him, "even, still, I think I would do it. I'd take the risk. I want to."

"Then I hope you eventually find that someone you want to take that risk with," he says, waiting until she twitches her lips with that vague smile again, "and until then, you can read all the _Cosmos_ you want. I wont say a word."

It made her grin, even if it did bring the blush back to her cheeks, and Rick was happy with that. He was even happier that he didn't have to give her 'the talk' after all.

"Do you think you'll find someone special again?" she asks, looking genuinely curious, even though her face did flash with a dawning of guilt a moment later.

_I already have,_ he wants to answer, not even seeing the dark look creeping into her eyes from her own words, because the first person he'd thought of was Daryl, not Lori, and maybe that wasn't such a bad thing to tell someone. But then he remembered the total indifference, the lips frozen beneath his own, and shoved his answer away, pretending not to have heard the question – whether or not Beth took his silence the wrong way or not.

.:.

* * *

Hershel had known Rick and Daryl separately for all of but a day. Daryl was not the only part of the 'package deal' that came with repenting for the near death of Rick's son. In fact, an entire group of tense relationships and terrible burdens moved into his property, and while he tried very hard to ignore them and avoid taking responsibility for their lives, it was not to be. Rick had been very involved with him, determined to break down all the barriers Hershel had been keeping between himself and those people. Daryl had been one of a kind, independent even in his own subjection to the decisions of those around them.

Hershel knew almost immediately what was wrong with the man – he did not want to be there.

At first, Hershel had thought the stranger just didn't want to be on the farm when there was a little girl missing that he was clearly determined to save. He observed, distantly and objectively, the way Daryl reacted to commands by certain people, how he behaved around those he knew and those he didn't, and how he handled conflict – he had to know if this person was a danger, and whether or not Rick could exercise enough control over him to restrain him.

He overheard a conversation between the Carol woman, whose missing daughter they were hopelessly scouring the woods for, and Patricia, talking about what each of the others had been like mere weeks ago. This Daryl Dixon was tamed, regardless of whether or not his wilder side was still hanging there by teeth and nails, and for some reason he respected Rick enough to avoid defying him - though the same didn't go for the other man, the one Hershel himself had a hard time looking at, _Shane_. Perhaps it was the way they talked to him, with varying degrees of respect and tolerance.

He didn't stop feeling uncomfortable with the man who camped on the outskirts until he was dragged into his home, bloodied and half-dead, requiring plenty of attention to keep Hershel's hands busy for an hour or so. Normally an incident like that would create more suspicion, not eliminate it, but upon removing Daryl's shirt so that the wound in his side could be managed, Hershel saw something that he'd never imagined would make him feel safer.

Scars. Plenty of them.

Perhaps it was an affinity between people who shared certain pasts – after all, his own father had been more literate with his fists than his words – or an empathy for deeply wounded people he could help, but he knew the source of those marks and he knew he could not condemn the man's social reservations. He doubted there was much trust left in a man that would glare even at the person holding the antiseptic.

He'd seen similar behaviour.

A local dogfighting ring had been taken down years ago, and many of the surviving animals had been brought to him for treatment; all aside from two that, because they suffered such extreme wounds on the face, needed parts of their nasal cavities reconstructed, and had to be sent elsewhere. Of the seven dogs that were brought in, only five survived the night, and another one passed away a week later. The four dogs he saved, each with their own scars, had each acted one of two ways. The three older dogs had cowered, whining whenever Hershel came near, trying to run to the opposite end of their pens, and for days not even food and water could coax them near. Those dogs all went on to good homes in the end, with people who cared little for the scars and more about the absolute devotion the Bull Terrior and two Boxer dogs showed for their respective new owners, who were brought in to handle them a few days a week for three weeks before adoption.

But the fourth dog, a Pit Bull Terrior, was younger than the others, with fewer scars and a habit of growling as it backed away, as opposed to whimpering. It kept its sight on whoever was near its pen, or whoever was tending to it, as though daring them to try and hurt it. Eventually it seemed to realise that all it truly wanted was some affection, and Hershel could finally approach it without hearing that growling threat. It was eventually transferred to another vet more equipped for rehabilitation, which Hershel could not help but think was probably the wrong idea, to then afflict the dog with abandonment, but he had no say in the matter – he wasn't in charge of the clinic at the time.

He doubts very much that Daryl would appreciate being compared to an abused dog, but he was a vet, not a doctor, and in many ways Daryl did remind him of that particular animal.

It was through his scars that Hershel got to know the man without even truly speaking to him. It was through Rick that he got to see the truer nature, because Rick was the one who revealed that Daryl could indeed trust people, and that he was loyal to them. Rick was also the one who revealed, unknowingly, that Daryl did not show expressions often – he showed a collection of masks, faces of reactions he thought he ought to feel to hide his true response behind them.

Many of the things they thought Daryl was feeling, judging by his expression and occasionally his behaviour, were wrong. Sometimes he slipped, showed his true colours without meaning to, such as the time when he'd accidentally shot Rick through the leg while trying to save him – he was angry, and hurt, and concerned, and he showed all of these things rather than trying to bury them behind indifference or relief.

Daryl and his collection of masks were as familiar to him as Rick. So why couldn't he figure out what was going on with him now?

Daryl was sitting beside Carol, picking at his food, and Hershel had to suppress his irritation – he'd just restored one person's eating habits, he didn't do it at the cost of another's. Daryl didn't often talk during meals, though he was happy to chatter briefly before or afterwards, but tonight he seemed almost too quiet. Isolated, just as he had been the night before after telling Hershel that Rick had been suffering from chills when he went to go check on him, and that he'd pulled the blankets up even though he wasn't sure if he was supposed to.

Daryl could sit in a room full of people and still look alone.

He'd been staring at Daryl ever since he saw Rick freeze, watching the hunter walk in at Carol's side, then sit next to her at the end of the table to avoid sitting next to anyone else. Daryl had never looked back in Rick's direction, blissfully ignorant even of Carol's presence right beside him.

Hershel couldn't tell if the look on Daryl's face was sincere or another mask, but he knew it was related to Rick. Everything was these days, ever since the two of them had begun having 'disagreements', some tentative conflict that they were all too afraid of interfering with. Except for Glenn, because that boy was too reckless, and had somehow managed to set them off again.

Hershel had no doubts that Rick's condition was directly related to Daryl's refusal to look in his direction.

So he had no choice but to do this.

He hated using his crutches up and down the stairs to the top level of cells, which was unfortunate because most of the others had migrated to the top storey after some time, and seeing as Rick needed his attention most frequently these past months it was easier to treat him below and then send him off. That had not been the case this morning, and his travel up and down those stairs had been slow, awkward, and filled with fleeting moments where he thought he might fall.

Regardless, he ventured up the stairs after dinner, to wait in Daryl's cell for him so that they might talk privately.

He waited less than ten minutes before Daryl barged into his own cell, immediately yanking at the buttons on his shirt as though trying to rip them free of the thread holding them. Hershel cleared his throat about a second after Daryl had spotted him anyway. The hunter's hands fell to his sides, stretching out as though they'd been fisted all day and were cramped.

"Fer a cripple, ya get around a lot."

Hershel chuckled in good nature. "They took my leg," he says, "not my will."

"That was deep, but yer just a stubborn ol' man."

"Quite," he agrees, figuring it was a fair assessment of his character, even if it wasn't intended to be. "Besides, there's always next year. Might lose something else, and I'll never be able to come up and visit you."

"Don' joke 'bout that."

"Alright. All business then. I need you to talk to Rick."

The metamorphosis from one type of anger into another was strangely clear. He grew firmer, stiller, intensely focused on every point of his body that may move on instinct, compacting all his habits and shoving them into some unseen place. This was Daryl trying very hard to not give anything away. This was a mask.

"No."

"I know you've noticed how disconnected he is. He needs to stop trying to take care of us and focus on himself, and I need you to persuade him."

"Do it yerself."

"He won't listen to_ me_, I'm just, as you said, just an old man," he insists, watching the way Daryl very carefully paces around the cell twice, then steps back until he's leaning against the wall opposite. "He's tired. He needs to rest and look after himself, but he wont because he's stuck on how it used to be, organising supply runs when we've got plenty to keep us safely in these gates for weeks, making sure we all have plenty to do while completely avoiding the administration block. He's trying to keep us alive, and he's forgetting to do the same for himself. He needs time to mourn his wife, properly."

Hershel knew he wasn't imagining the way Daryl's eyes seemed to narrow in pain, as though talking about Rick in mourning was an unbearable thought. Considering he either didn't speak about it or went completely backwards and started screaming at empty corners, like there was no healthy place between reacting intensely and not reacting at all, it wasn't so surprising that this would be so. It seemed any kind of harm coming to Rick had the potential of a domino affect, particularly with Daryl.

Rick has been through too much to just let him keep going on the way he is.

"I need you to really look at him, and tell me what you see," he says, eyeing Daryl until the man could no longer meet his gaze. He never could hold it long with anyone apart from Rick or Carl. "It's been so hard to overlook, because nothing has truly changed. Whatever's going on, whatever bad blood's between you right now, I need you to push that aside, because you're the only one he's going to listen to. Just one word from you and he'll do it."

"Do what."

"Stop trying to lead us when he doesn't have to."

Hershel thinks that, perhaps this time, the anger on Daryl's face isn't a mask. Maybe, just for a moment, it was real.

.:.

* * *

**A/N:** So I didn't write this in the original story, but I shoved it in because I thought it was necessary. There's no actual Rick and Daryl interaction, but there's the full explanation to some of Rick's behaviour that I've been hinting at. I also needed some bonding between Rick and another character, to build up a bit of the necessary plot. I'm also in love with Beth, so that's part of it.

Thankyou everyone who was encouraging in their reviews last chapter. That was actually a really nervous publishing moment for me, and your responses were sweet and have helped immensely with my courage to post things like that. Considering the nature of this story, it would've been stupid if I kept on feeling bashful much longer. So many authors can just swing scenes like that in here, there, and everywhere, and I'm just sitting here shyly trying to write them without being too vulgar.

Oh, and Happy New Year everybody!

**Love, MK**

_(There were problems when I tried to update this chapter. Whenever I clicked on my Manage Stories list, 'Error Type 1' would come up. After checking on 'is it down right now', I found a lot of comments by other users saying the same thing was happening to them. One of the posters eventually found a solution around the error, so it hasn't been fixed, but I can update chapters, just not edit any story info. To the anons who posted reviews asking about it - I had no way of contacting you to explain, but I did feel very guilty seeing them, and I'm so sorry!)_


	10. Sapien X : Carnivora

**Sapien**

_Part X : Carnivora_

.:.

"You're slipping, Rick," Hershel tells him. He wishes it wasn't, but it's humiliating that the old man decides to do this now rather than in private where Rick can ignore him all he likes...which is probably why he's doing it now, actually. It's obvious that they've planned this, and he feels rather ambushed.

The others are all here, every last one of them. Daryl's up on the catwalk with Judith in his arms, keeping his eyes on her and not even looking down at Rick, like she was the only thing in the room. Carl and Beth are on the stairs, and at the bottom of them Carol has her arm linked with Axel's, Oscar standing a short ways away from them both. Maggie and Glenn are up on the catwalk too, Glenn watching Daryl while Maggie looks down on Rick with that same brand of sympathy he feels he could do without. It's the same look he's been avoiding for days now.

He's been avoiding this talk, too. He's known it was coming since Hershel started hinting that he needed to look after himself instead of worrying about them.

"We all understand, believe me." _Bullshit_. "You've done a lot for us. You kept us alive, and I'm sorry it took us a while to see that what you did was to give us all a fighting chance, one that we wouldn't have had if we'd gone out on our own. You took control in a situation that none of us have ever been in, and you pulled us out on top, and as a result you lost your wife."

He hopes there's a point to this and he's not just listening to Hershel remind him that no matter how hard he tried he still made the biggest mistake of all. The past few days have been rough enough without having his failures shoved in his face _in front of everyone_. Daryl's been ignoring him, he's been dreaming of Lori, and now he's having to eat twice as much as he's used to – he carries with him a constant ball of nausea, now.

Judith starts to cry up above, like she could feel the palpable tension in the cell block, like she could _sense_ her father's spiraling mood. Daryl hushes her, though it does nothing to quell the beginning of her wails. He doesn't take her away; he keeps on trying to soothe her, the same way they've seen him do many times. It's not working this time.

Hershel, though he's staring up at Daryl with a look similar to annoyance, addresses Rick again. "You need to stop. You need to take a break. We're safe here, Rick. Stop worrying about us and focus on being a father. Don't run yourself into the ground the way you've been doing."

"I'm fine," Rick tries to insist, but it sounds weak and hoarse, still not quite recovered.

"No, you're not!" Glenn shouts down from the catwalk out of nowhere, the first time the young man's spoken to him, and looked straight at him without falter, in days. "We don't blame _you_, Rick." He looks to Daryl again, a flicker of movement from the hunter's chin in response. He's noticed, and he's ignoring it. Maggie grabs Glenn by the arm suddenly, and he knows he's not the only one who picked up on the way Glenn only falls quiet when Maggie clamps down on him, restraining him almost. There's silence, the pressure of puzzlement, and it makes Rick's skin crawl. Everything just feels so _wrong._

It's Carol who speaks this time, her mousy voice an inch louder than he was used to hearing from her mouth, but her confidence is betrayed by the white-knuckled grip on Axel's sleeve. "You need to rest, Rick. We _are _safe here, and you did that. You gave us a place where we can learn to live again, and we haven't thanked you for it. I'm sorry. We should've said or done something sooner. Hershel's right, you've done so much for us and we forget sometimes that you never had to."

"Please," Hershel adds in now that Carol's said her piece, "do this for your little girl. Take all the time you need, and let us take care of things for a while. Let us help."

Rick feels himself starting to grow dizzy even as they're telling him he needs to take a break, yet still he can't help but protest, shaking his head like he was afraid of relinquishing his hold over them. "No."

"Rick," Daryl speaks up from above, Judith's cries no louder but unfortunately persistent. He's rubbing a hand over her back still, trying to calm her down, still not looking at anything but her. The tightness of his face says it all, that he didn't want to say anything. "You gotta, man. She gon' need her daddy there for her. Yer gon' kill yerself 'fore she says her first word at the rate yer goin' now."

_I don't see how that would be such a bad thing,_ he thinks traitorously, and it's only with those silent words he couldn't bring himself to say that he realises they're right. He's exhausted. He can't keep trying to hold everyone else up at the cost of himself. But...he can't just _stop_, can he?

Daryl's already gone by the time he looks back up again, nursing Judith in one of the cells most likely until she calms down. He'd been hoping that the other man might acknowledge him at least. Maybe talk through it. That's the kind of thing Daryl would've done four days ago.

They're all just looking at him now, like they're expecting some kind of change-of-pace speech or some kind of revelation from him. They don't know what's nestled in the centre of his chest, tearing him to pieces, a self-loathing so blackened with guilt and regret that he couldn't draw it from the dark and back into the light.

With the eyes of his entire group sans Daryl on him, he all but scuttles out of the cellblock, avoiding looking at them all and planning to search for some kind of solitude far from where they could find him. It's not comforting to know that everyone, even Daryl, doesn't think he's got what it takes to keep leading them. After everything he's done.

He didn't plan on Carl following him, too zoned out to even hear his son's light steps until they're in the mess hall.

"Dad!" Carl cries out, and Rick feels himself clench all over at the anger in his son's voice. "Weren't you even listening?"

"Carl-"

"They just want you to get better. Don't be mad at them for that."

He can hear the shuffle and click of Hershel's crutches, the cautious steps of the others following, and for a second he feels the heat coiled in his chest tense as though to lash out like a snake, nearly telling them to all mind their own fucking business for just two minutes. As quickly as the anger comes, his temper breaks again. He feels Carl's hand on his forearm, sliding down to his wrist, forcing him to turn around. It was harder than it should've been to meet his son's eyes then.

"I want you to stop."

No matter how many times it happened, no matter what combination of words or what voice they were carried on, it fascinated him how easy it was to wind him without even throwing a punch. It wasn't just the others, no, his own _son_ had lost faith in him. Daryl had lost faith in him long ago. Between one man's vanishing act and his young son's mature gaze, he could feel the fight draining out of him. Maybe they didn't need him to lead them, and maybe he would be better off focusing on himself, but none of that mattered if they all still believed in him.

But they didn't. In fact, he's not even sure he believes in himself. After all, how was he supposed to guard their lives if that wasn't his top priority? His head was all over the place, and maybe he'd just been using his leadership as a distraction. The only think he can think about is that night, trying to understand what went wrong. Everything else was just conveniently in the way of those thoughts.

"Please," Carl insists, softly so that the others who had gathered in the doorway couldn't hear.

He had to fix this, for himself and his son. He needed to prove he could still be the man they all needed him to be. He needed to sort some things out. Carl needed him, and he had to be strong enough to handle that.

The moment he sets his palm on the top of his son's head, Carl's heated expression lowers to something torn between relief and disappointment. That crestfallen look kicks him harder than being told almost outright that his son didn't think him strong enough. He needs to do this.

Reluctantly, eyes flickering over his peoples' heads as though Daryl might be hovering just out of plain sight, he walks toward them, Hershel watching him like he was about to start losing his mind all over again. That same fearful look, cautious of him. He'd always known they were afraid of him deep down, but that mistrust is coming to the surface now. He can see it in all their eyes now that he's close enough.

_I need to fix this._

His pride wont let him say the words, but he holds out his hand for Hershel to take in his own and gives the old man a reluctant nod. Hershel smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkled warmly at him, and Rick wishes it didn't hurt to see them all so relieved.

"Thankyou, Rick. You'll understand soon, I promise you that."

.:.

* * *

_Four weeks. It's been four weeks,_ he thinks, meeting the tired eyes of his own ragged reflection.

Even without the pressure of organising the food and the supplies, planning supply runs, cleaning out the parts of the prison they'd secured so far, maintaining the water and the food and the generators they were using sparingly, and even without the added worry of continuously making head-counts of the people around him, it wasn't any easier to get himself back in order.

Carl wasn't talking to him, but though he had all the time in the world to try talking to his son he still didn't, because he had absolutely no idea what to say. He wasn't like his own father, who could talk circles around him on the worst of days. Before the turn, Lori was the one who did all the talking with their son, which was more because of a conflict in their ideas of parenting than anything. Rick had wanted to go easier on him, let him stay up late sometimes and sneak him that extra dessert, but Lori wasn't having it. At some point, he just gave up, letting his wife have her way with how they were going to raise their child.

Carl didn't listen to him, anyway. Nevermind the fact he didn't even know why the boy was ignoring him in the first place.

Seems that happens to him a lot.

Other than that, his blisters faded, and so did his sunburn. He hadn't been wrong when he figured it'd only take a couple of weeks to get some meat back on his body, and now that he was healthy and filling back out where he was supposed to, he was also back out in the garden. At least this time he was being smarter about it rather than just using it as an output for his aggressive energy. Hershel passed on everything he knew as the days passed, and then weeks, and now a month was gone in the same whispered fashion.

It was Winter again.

He was frustrated and a little worried that the others might start to blame him for all their previous unfortunate luck, but next to some of his other problems his validity as a leader was pretty minor. Daryl was a stranger who sat next to him at meals but otherwise had barley anything to do with him, aside from in his dreams of course. Carl was being a stubborn brat, and Rick couldn't for the life of him figure what the boy's problem was. Maggie was determined to make sure Rick was doing okay and that he knew they were all there to listen if he wanted to talk.

The only people he wanted to talk to weren't even looking at him.

He'd worn holes into both knees of each of his jeans, and all of his flannels had loose threads somewhere. One was even missing most of its buttons. There must've been some discussion about his deteriorating attire because he found himself with a few new sets of clothes and the demands to go scrub up before coming to breakfast the next morning. Demands he was more than happy to comply with – threadbare clothes weren't the best defense against the change of season.

On a whim, he ended up shaving, too.

The communal bathroom only had a very sparse amount of hot water each day, and they still hadn't quite figured out how they were going to improve that situation. They could just use the generators, but that would be at the risk of setting off all the alarms again. Hershel had suggested the DIY solar panels from the hardware store. Then again, it wasn't exactly Rick's problem anymore, not unless he was part of the group that went to get them. He decided to leave the hot water for the others, endured a cold rinse, and shivered the whole time he was scrubbing his skin raw with the caustic yellow soap they found in the supply storerooms – the one that stung his eyes and the small grazes on the backs of his knuckles and smelled kind of like either old spice or old leather. He couldn't remember anymore.

The communal bathroom had a long mirror that stretched over the row of sinks, and in the top right-hand corner of one panel, Beth's handwriting in gaudy red lipstick scrawled a cheery note:_ It's a new day!_

It'd been there for weeks, and no one had washed it off. They probably never would.

She was exactly right. Each day was a new day, and it was one more day to be thankful for having. One more day that they might not have had if they'd made just one different decision out there in the wild, living out of their cars and abandoned houses, fending for themselves against the world that'd turned on them. In fact, Rick's doesn't think there could've been a better motivational thing for Beth to write on that mirror.

He looks at his own reflection, sees the scraggly greying beard and the curling twists of unruly hair, he thinks back to just over a year ago when he'd woken from the turn. He remembers how young he looked in comparison to now, facial hair ageing him five or ten years at least.

_It's a new day, after all,_ he thinks, and takes up the travel razor sitting seemingly innocently enough on the ledge just above the sink. There's also a silver straight razor which Daryl uses, but Rick couldn't bring himself to risk it and leave the bathroom with a dozen small cuts on his face, so he takes up the battery-operated shaver and turns it on after a moment's hesitation. The faint buzzing fills the air in a way that seems so alien after this past year. Whereas once electric razors and toothbrushes were common sound, now his morning was chorused with the hissing and snarling of walkers, and the warble of birds he'd never known while living in Kings.

He's a little out of practice, and without the shaving cream he has to make a foamy lather out of the soap, but he gets it done in a matter of minutes. Splashing cold water on his reddened cheeks, he meets his own icy blue eyes in the mirror, palms over his face and reluctant. When he pulls his hands away, bare glistening skin he hadn't seen since the start of the apocalypse greeted him, and he wonders why he ever stopped shaving in the first place.

Christ, he looks so much younger – he actually looks closer to his age now, rather than like he'd been living dog years.

Even if it's a relief to see a face he recognised looking back at him through the mirror, he's not entirely sure he likes it, though that could have less to do with his appearance and more to do with what the others are going to think when he walks out there, trimmed up like he is. He catches himself wondering what Daryl will think, and very nearly gives in to the temptation to smack a hand to his face.

He'd been trying so hard until now not to think of what had happened between them, to follow Daryl's example and act as if nothing ever happened, but every damn day his mind would take him back against that wall with the other man's fist around him, kissing that unwilling mouth and realising that something was wrong, and every damn day he'd wonder just what the hell had happened. Dozens of times he'd considered just cornering Daryl and asking him, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Instead, he was stuck with his own incessant thoughts on repeat.

Why would Daryl do something like that, only to walk off like they'd just made small talk about the weather? Why would he give Rick everything he wanted, only to rip it all away?

Until that night, Rick had thought he just wanted physical release, and his attraction to Daryl was on a shallow level based almost completely on availability and convenience. The pain he felt when he was ignored, that was all because he could feel his best friend slipping through his fingers. It hadn't been anything more than that, as far as he was concerned.

But then he'd gotten exactly what he wanted, only to realise he wanted _more_. He wanted to kiss Daryl again and this time get a response. He wanted to grab at the other man's crotch and find him just as turned on as he himself was. He wanted to make _Daryl_ feel good. It wasn't just about himself at all. It wasn't just about burning some restless energy or blowing off some steam – he wanted to feel good, alive, and he wanted Daryl to feel that, too.

They were safe inside the walls of the prison, but still they weren't living – only surviving. Breathing isn't the same thing as having a soul.

Daryl's spirit was hurting. Rick had seen it from the moment he allowed himself to look beyond the standoffish attitude, seeing all the things that made the rest of them human lying right there beneath the surface. Compassion, trust, fear...Daryl was human, and he needed something to live for just like Rick did.

Rick knows he loves Daryl, just as he loves Glenn and Maggie and Hershel and all the others, learning to care for Axel and Oscar the same as he'd learned to care for everybody else. Maybe there wasn't so much separation between his affection and his desire as he'd first thought. That he wanted to feel Daryl's body against his own wasn't separate from looking out for his well-being.

Rick's not sure how he ever imagined them as two opposing desires, the part of him that wanted to become physically more, and the part that wanted to continue with their kinship the way it was.

Somehow, he'd always imagined doing those things behind closed doors with Daryl only to walk back out and into the same relationship they'd always had, to sit beside one another at meals and to watch one another's back when there's danger about. He wanted Daryl to keep joking with him the way he never did with anyone else, to keep testing him by ordering him around, to talk about his past and his present and their future.

_Their _future.

_Fuck._

.:.

* * *

Rick had never felt so goddamned blind with his eyes now wide open. He wanted to enter the dining hall and join the others, but at the very thought of seeing Daryl sitting there staring off out the highlights, thoughts a million miles away – _probably where he wished to be, miles and miles away_ – he couldn't bring himself to take that final step around the corner.

Everyone was chattering happily, talking about the food or, in Beth's case, a teacher she'd had a crush on in highschool. Rick noticed all these conversations, trying to lock in on one and pull away from his own problems, but nothing was sticking. Nothing but the thought of Daryl's cold glare staring right past him, like he didn't exist, because if he had to endure that one more time he just might give the man his wish and fade away completely.

They were all happier without him. He couldn't leave, he refused, but he could at the very least make their lives easier by keeping his distance. Especially from Daryl and his son, because as far as he knew, they both seemed to hate him right now. He doesn't even know what he did to piss Carl off, but he'd done something terrible to Daryl by putting him in that position and he doesn't know how to fix it.

Everything felt so broken.

Break something enough times, it gets hard to put it back together. Rick aint never known of superglue strong enough to fix relationships.

He sighs, smacking his head back against the wall too softly to do any damage or make a sound, but the strike jostle his brain and he feels a faint throb. His eyes are closed and he's trying to focus on his own breath, a hand against his forehead slowly falling over his eyes, when two voices startlingly close begin to talk. One of them's Daryl.

"She waited for you," Oscar says quietly. Daryl makes a quiet, grunting sound. "You can't be mad at her for moving on."

"'m not mad. Jus' when it happens, he better treat her right. Last man that hit her got a hell of a beatin'. A shame it wasn't me throwin' tha punches."

"Axel aint like that. He's a good man."

"I know...she needs someone. Someone good fer her."

"Everyone does," Oscar says, then after a pause, "I mean, you kinda had Rick for a while there-"

"What tha hell do you know about it!"

The other conversations dimmer, continuing but at a lower volume, curious at Daryl's tone but well aware of the chances that he would storm off if he felt like he was the centre of attention. Rick himself feels his own hackles start to rise, along with a burning anger. Would Glenn or Maggie say anything?

"I was just saying that everyone deserves-"

"I meant about Rick."

"Oh...I _was_ right-"

"Shut up!"

"Hey, it's cool, man, hey- _hey!_ The hell's yer problem?"

"How'd ya know," Daryl hisses, and it's quieter but he sounds closer.

"It's just the way he looks at you sometimes," Oscar says in a hush, the conversations around them back at a roar. It's hard for Rick to make out all the words completely at first, but he registers each one before Oscar continues. "He's not exactly shy about it."

"Ah told 'im," Daryl growls. "Wish he'd keep his eyes in his fucken skull fer once."

Oscar doesn't respond for a moment, then finally, "does anyone know?"

"Know _what._"

"About you and Rick."

"There aint nothin' 'tween me an' him, alright? Keep yer fucken' mouth shut."

"Wait, I'm confused... you and Rick aint-"

"No!"

Rick doesn't want to wait around to hear any more. He doesn't want to feel his heart ripping slowly from his chest, severing his arteries from the inside and filling him with cold, lifeless blood. He'd always imagined that was how it'd feel if a walker's hand tore out his ribs, but after Lori he knew there were other things that could leave you feeling like you'd died a violent death. He doesn't want to feel that kind of pointless agony.

But then Daryl stutters.

"I-I mean, he an' I...we..._once_..."

"...not that I really wanna ask, but what happened?"

"Nothin' happened, man. We aint queer. It's done."

"But he's- and you're...you're _sure?_"

"It's _done._"

"Is that what his little breakdown was about? It was, wasn't it. What did you do?"

"I aint done nothin' he didn't want me to."

"You broke his heart, didn't you?"

"Aint nothin' there ta break! He's was just lookin' fer someone ta screw around with. Like ah told ya, we aint fucken queer."

"He's a mess."

"He'll get over it."

"Open your bloody eyes, man!"

"What'd you say ta me?"

It was on impulse that Rick rounded the corner into the dining hall, a lurch of dread tight in his chest, wrapping around the guilt like a barbed ribbon. If Daryl and Oscar came to blows, it would be all his fault, and the last thing he wanted to see was either man hurt. Like his presence alone crushed the conversations, though Daryl's rising voice might've helped with that, everyone turned to look at him the moment he appeared through the doorway, and Rick took each of them in while he had the chance.

Daryl and Oscar were, as he'd thought, closer than the others. Oscar had his back to the wall, and Daryl looked midstep to approaching him, a fist at his side not to form a punch but to restrain himself, an outlet for his anger. If he hadn't cut his nails recently, there would be small crescents in his palms, possibly bleeding depending on how angry he is.

From the look on his face, he's pretty damn pissed. He's pissed, and now he's staring at Rick, locked target. Rick considers turning around and walking back the other way.

Only, Glenn wolf-whistles, earning grins from Maggie and Carol and Beth all sitting around him in an ellipse at the other end of the dining area. He's on the table, feet on the bench, so he's sitting higher than everyone else in the room and Rick can't help but notice him from his self-made pedestal. Daryl looks over at Glenn with a creasing frown, but then his eyes shoot straight back to Rick, and though they still have some of that anger, most of it's aborted to frustration now.

Hershel, who's leaning against the wall with his crutches beside him, and Axel, who's behind Carol with a hand on her shoulder, haven't reacted at all outside of small, relaxed smiles. Oscar, despite being backed against a wall, looks over Daryl's shoulder at Glenn with a smirk.

"You clean up nice," Oscar says gamely. Daryl takes a step away from everyone, rocking back on his heels like he's been struck with vertigo.

"What's the occasion?" Carol asks sweetly, folding her hands in her lap. He's glad that his tension around her wore off over the weeks, seeing her gradually growing closer to Axel the same way she had with Daryl, only this time there was a charged undercurrent between the two of them. Axel made Carol feel good about herself, and she was smiling more than he'd ever seen, lighting up her face with a beauty that'd been discouraged by the weight of the Apocalypse. He'd been jealous of Carol, on some subconscious level he didn't like admitting to himself, but he wasn't anymore. At least, not excessively so.

"No occasion," Rick murmurs, feeling just a little overwhelmed by the weight of eyes all on him, "just...change, you know."

"Yeah," she nods in agreement, one of those delicate hands leaving her lap and moving to cover Axel's over her shoulder. They don't need to say much else, they never really did. Months with the same people really helped you understand one another on a base level, where the hardships and victories are all suffered and celebrated together. He didn't have to say anything else because they all knew exactly what he was meaning to say.

"You're out of practice," Hershel says from across the room, "you don't need any stitches, do you?"

"We've got new thread," Glenn grins, "if that's what you're worried about. C'mon, fess up, you're bleeding out aren't you?"

"Not a scratch," Rick chuckles, knowing he was being teased. He_ had_ been rather prone to injuries these past few months, so he deserved that one.

"That's 'cause real men use tha straight razor," Daryl pitches in. Rick knows he's not the only one momentarily stunned by the sound of that gravelly voice, but he guesses he's the only one who feels the fluttering sensations in his stomach because of it. He recovers in his own way, suddenly unable to restrain the way his eagerness pulls the corners of his mouth wider.

"You caught me."

"Thought so," Daryl snorts, folding his arms over his chest, but there's a bit of amusement there in his smile, one he's trying to keep hidden. Rick can see it, because he's good at seeing it now.

No one else says anything, and Rick realises that the others are looking between him and Daryl like they were waiting for a fireworks display, eager wonderment. Oscar and Glenn, they both were suppressing smirks, trying and failing to keep the amusement off their faces. Maggie was the only one who didn't seem happy to see them interacting, rolling her lips together with a conflicted tenseness about her expression – like she wasn't quite sure what to make of it.

Rick wasn't, either. He also didn't particularly like being the centre of attention. Not like this.

"So, what've I been missing?"

.:.

* * *

"Rick," Maggie's voice is soft, but her work boots are heavy and the sound of her speedwalking on the catwalk behind him is unmistakably urgent, the metal grate rattling with each step like she was sprinting instead. "Can I talk to you?"

"Sure," he says before he's even turned around, hand reaching out to grab hard on the rail. He does turn, just as Maggie stops behind him, but not before looking down on the ground floor of the cell block to see if anyone else was lingering around. None that he could see. "What is it, Maggie?"

"I know you know we saw...that thing, with you and Daryl? Glenn, he been onto you two for months, before we even got to the prison. Maybe we all were, but the rest of of us just didn't know what we were seein'. I mean, Daryl, we're nothing without him. When he got sick durin' the winter, or when he'd get stuck for days on a hunting trip, we were all terrified, but none quite so much as you."

Maggie was a beautiful young woman, brave and strong and well suited for protecting those dearest to her – it just so happened that this little group of rag-tag survivors were dearest to her. From the look on her face right now, a crease in her brow and her chin dimpled like she was close to tears, Rick supposed he was pretty dear to her, too. Her sympathy he couldn't stand, but this was tenderness and he found he didn't quite mind seeing that.

"I mean, the rest of us, we just stared out the window waiting for him, or listened to Lori carry on about taking care of the problem, like a bunch of kicked dogs. But you...you never gave up... and he always came straight to you when he got back. Even that time-" she stops to laugh under her breath, "-remember that time he dragged back a sack full'o rabbits and fowls? It must'a been below zero, and he came back soaked to the bone, shivering, shaking his hair like a wet sheepdog. First thing he did was ask after you, making sure everyone was fine and nothing needed doing. There he was on the verge of hypothermia, and he just wanted to talk to you."

Rick's grinning too, and Maggie's giggling again, both remembering their stubborn redneck hadn't changed an ounce in these past months whatsoever.

"I remember," Rick says softly, "first thing I did when I saw him was walked back the way I came. He's just standing there, pooling water on the floor, shaking like a leaf, but when I walked away-"

"The look on his face!" Maggie giggles, "at first he looked like you'd just broken his crossbow, then he got mad. Actually, no, he just looked like you broke his crossbow, 'cause I'm pretty sure that's exactly how he'd react."

"I think I threw half the shit in those closets around the room before I found that poncho."

"You just came out and ripped his jacket and shirt right offa him," Maggie says, arm around her middle and leaning against the wall opposite Rick, trying to hide her grin behind her other hand. "I don't think I'd ever seen him blush before, but he went bright red, wrapped his arms around himself all nervous like, trying to cover everything. Then you just went and yanked the poncho over his head."

"I don't think he knew what to do," Rick smirks, remembering the other man's embarrassment. "_Do I look like a spic ta you?_"

"I love that man," Maggie whispers through a bright grin, her eyes softened and alight in a way Rick hadn't noticed them being around anyone but Glenn.

"We all do," Rick says softly in agreement, leaning back against the handrail completely.

"And he loves you," she says. Rick hates the way his heart thunders nervously at those words. Suddenly, the serious tone comes back into her voice. "I don't know how he loves you, but he does. What I can't figure is why he'd be so cruel to you without reason-"

"He's not-"

"Wait," she holds out her hand, "what I'm saying is, something's going on with him, and you need to talk to him. Don't just let him pretend nothing happened, because something _did_ happen, and something happened to you, too."

Rick wants to walk away from her, and perhaps if it were someone like Glenn or Hershel, he might've. That was how he dealt with Lori bringing up things he didn't want to talk about – taking a page out of her book and walking away from her had become something he just did without second thought. It was a bad habit. The only difference was that this time, the woman in his face wasn't clawing at him about his mistakes or the things he was doing wrong, but instead she was trying to help. That anyone was trying to help him, it must've been obvious how broken things really were.

"He aint talking to me," Rick says softly, like it hadn't been completely obvious this past month anyway.

"I know," she says, "I can tell, and not just 'cause I don't see you together anymore, but today, when he actually spoke to you...you lit up, and it was so heartbreaking. You didn't see it, but when you left to get from Carl the watch tower, Daryl just shut down. He looked really guilty – I think he knows what it's doing to you."

"What do you suggest?"

"Tonight," she says, "he'll go to his cell for a few hours after dinner before he takes over Oscar's shift. Go to him, sit his ass down, and make him tell you what's going on with him."

"I already know what he's going to say. It'll be exactly the same thing he keeps trying to tell me. I'm not sure I can put myself through that again."

"You're gonna try anyhow, right?"

Rick doesn't quite know he can give a positive response to that, but it's only a few seconds into wondering how he's going to answer that he breaks into a laugh. "The world's ending, we broke _into_ a prison, the dead are walking, and here I'm more scared of _Daryl_."

"You say that like you're the only one."

* * *

**A/N:** So once again, sorry that the update was late last week. Thankfully FFnet got itself together the next day. I had to rush through this proofread, so I apologise in hindsight if there are more inconsistencies than usual.  
I didn't really want to do a time skip that massive, but there was nothing of substance that happened during that month that couldn't be explained afterwards. I can assure you guys that it will be the last time skip that big. It's also occurred to me that this is a really long bloody story, which explains why it's taking so long to finish it (I'm several chapters ahead of you guys at all times, which is why I always post on a monday, except for technical difficulties) and I just want to thank everyone who's stuck with it so far and is going to keep reading. I love you guys!

I thought I'd get this whole story finished during the Christmas break, but I barely wrote a damn thing for it. I'm back at work now which is actually a good thing because I seem to write better when I'm under pressure of time frames. Otherwise I just dick off because I know there isn't anything important I need to do, like sleeping for example.

**Love, MK**


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